C O L L E C T E D    P O E M S
by Charles Spear

Charles Spear (1910-1985) is one of the few genuine exotics in the garden of New Zealand poetry. Emerging from obscurity in the late 1940s in Landfall, Arachne and the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, Spear published a single volume, Twopence Coloured (The Caxton Press, 1951) before falling silent again. Yet his vivid, succinct and enigmatic lyrics with their expert rhyming stanzas, their striking imagery and their sometimes arcane allusions to European literature and history retain their freshness and fascination more than half a century later. This edition reprints the contents of his only book and adds a handful of uncollected pieces together with some highly personal new poems written shortly before his death... [more]

Notes to Collected Poems

The text of a talk given by Ian Wedde as the launch of Collected Poems by Charles Spear, at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Thursday 11 October 2007

L O O K I N G  W E S T ,   L A T E   A F T E R N O O N ,  L O W  
W A T E R    
b y   A L L E N   C U R N O W

The first publication of the Holloway Press. This book is a superb example of Allen Curnow's verbal art, weaving consumately together strands from many earlier poems, ranging from "At Dead Low Water" of 1945 to numerous poems of more recent decades, especially those connected with Karekare, the west coast beach near Auckland which has often been the locus of his poetic meditations... [more]

T O M A R A T A
b y   K E N D R I C K   S M I T H Y M A N
w i t h   a n   A f t e r w o r d   b y   P e t e r   S i m p s o n . 1 9 9 6

Planned while the poet Kendrick Smithyman was still alive and with his cooperation, this book became, sadly, a memorial publication with the poet's death on 26 December 1995 at the age of 73. Smithyman was one of New Zealand's most profilic and accomplished poets, publishing more than a dozen volumes and more than 700 individual poems in a long career. Tomarata  is published here exactly fifty years after his first book, Seven Sonnets... [more]
 

C A S T O R   B A Y 
p i c t u r e s   &   p r o s e   b y   W Y S T A N   C U R N O W.  1996

While these short prose pieces are from Wystan Curnow's early work (1979), the pictures (in blue/grey/green) were developed seventeen years later in 1996. They are simply constructed from a single rectangular zinc block found at the Press... [more]

T H E   D O G S   O F   A U C K L A N D
p o e m   b y   R O B E R T   C R E E L E Y

w i t h  i n k   d r a w i n g s   b y   M a x   G i m b l e t t

In mid-1995 American poet Robert Creeley spent three months in New zealand as a Senior Fullbright Scholar at the University of Auckland. During that time he wrote this poem in eight sections, The Dogs of Auckland,  which now becomes the second book he has published in this country, the first being Hello (Hawk Press 1976).
   Accompanying the poem are eight drawings by New Zealand artist Max Gimblett... [more]

F A N T A S T I C A :   T H I R T E E N   D R A W I N G S   B Y
L E O   B E N S E M A N N

This is a new edition of a remarkable book by the artist and printer Leo Bensemann (1912-1986) first published in  Christchurch  by The Caxton Press in 1937. It was at the time the most ambitious publication attempted by the printing and publishing firm established by Denis Glover and John drew in 1935... [more]
 

R I T A

Colin McCahon (1919-87), New Zealand’s greatest artist, was a friend to poets, a lover of poetry, and during the 1970s an occasional poet himself. He wrote this intimate and moving sequence after the death of Rita Angus in 1970. It recalls various occasions on which McCahon met Angus between the 1930s and the 1960s.This is the first time poems by McCahon have been published... [more]

 

H A P P Y   M O M E N T S
T e x t   &   i m a g e s   b y   L E N   L Y E

Edited and with an afterword by ROGER HORROCKS

The Holloway Press 2002

Happy Moments is the first complete publication of Len Lye’s remarkable autobiographical texts written in New York in the 1960s. The 21 texts (plus Lye’s introduction) are accompanied by eight previously unpublished drawings or ‘doodles’ as Lye called them. The book is edited and with an afterword by Roger Horrocks, author of the definitive Len Lye: a biography (Auckland University Press, 2001)... [more]