Poets and short story writers

Press, 4 December 1981, Page 8 (Supplement)

Poets and short story writers

New Zealand poets and short story writers are featured in four of the books recently published by Oxford University Press. “End Wall” is Murray Edmond's third collection of poems. The poems in the book were al] written between 1973 and 1981, and the majority of them have not been published in book form tiefore. Murray Edmond lives in Wellington and is working as writer, actor and director for Town and Country Players. Ari extract from the poem, “Painting": “I saw a painting called ‘End Wall’ and the surface of this wall was bruised in blue as though the painter had beaten the skin and taken from the canvas the colour of the paint, but with the cunning of a torturer he did not kill, he left a space for light to live and cut a hole, an eye, a window

in the wall for looking out and looking in." "End Wall,” has 48 pages and costs $9.95. “The Letters of A. R. D. Fairburn,” have been selected and edited by Lauris Edmond. Fairburn was born in 1904 and died in 1957. He was a poet, a satirist and a critic with a highly-varied career, working as an insurance clerk, a freelance journalist, radio scriptwriter, English tutor and'art lecturer. Lauris Edmond, in her selection of 237 letters out of the 900 in the Turnbull Library, has attempted to do justice to the complex and engaging personality of their writer. The hard cover book has 272 pages and costs $29.95. “In the Glass Case” is a series of essays on New Zealand literature by C. K. Stead. Professor Stead teaches at the University of Auckland and is widely known as a poet. He has been writing about New Zealand litera-

ture for a quarter of a century. Amongst those included in this book are: Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, James K. Baxter, and Denis Glover. The book is hard-covered, has 293 pages, and costs $16.90. “Collected Stories — Maurice Duggan,” is also edited and introduced by Professor Stead. It is a hard-covered book, has 380 pages, and costs $25. “When Maurice Duggan began writing, towards the end of World War 11, New Zealand short stories tended to portray ordinary people in their own inarticulate idiom. Duggan erupted into this scene flourishing a mannered, though vigorous, elegance of style and an extensive vocabulary,” Professor Stead says. “In later years, this aspect of Duggan seemed less singular, although as a stylist, he remained unsurpassed,” Professor Stead says.