Literary luminaries

Press, 10 December 1988, Page 27

Literary luminaries

Moments Of Invention: Portraits of 21 New Zealand Writers. By Greg O’Brien and Robert Cross. Heinemann Reed, 1988. 150 pp. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) As its length and format suggest, this volume is a series of mini essays which attempt to distil the essence of literary luminaries. All the grand old men and women of New Zealand letters are faithfully captured, fondling the dog, gazing pensively over rugged West Coast landscapes, or brooding under contemporary works of indigenous art in Manukau Harbour view retreats. The more avant garde are photographed in surrealist settings heavy with symbolic light and shade. We are treated to cosy insights of the artist in his or her environment — Cilla McQueen in the backyard of her small brick Dunedin house, Janet Frame in an austerely furnished apartment which appears to be the 1980 s equivalent of an army hut at the bottom of Frank Sargeson’s Takapuna

garden, and Lauris Edmond in a genteel drawing room overlooking Oriental Bay. There are brief biographical sketches (Marilyn Duckworth, solo parent of four children, stepmother to a further three; Fiona Kidman victim of small town repression), selected quotations from the seminal works, and the author’s own academic judgments. “Curnow sees poetry as a means of entering into the picture ... into the landscape or historical setting ... investigating the relationship between the Word and the World, between Self and Outside.”

In spite of pretensious lapses in what is otherwise an accessible introduction to a diverse range of our living poets and novelists, this is a useful and, one imagines, a “commercially viable” publication. It opens up areas for wider reading, brings the writers alive as people, and is a masterpiece of the photographer’s and typographer’s art.