Flaxroots Productions - FlaxFlower

Immediacy of pain expressed in poetry

13/3/2025

over under fed
by Amy Marguerite

Amy Marguerite’s collection 'over under fed' doesn’t lack for words and doesn’t lack for excitement, but reading it leaves me thinking that all the words have been collected together at the bottom of a slide, each of them landing at random in a heap. We enter it at our own risk and from whatever angle we just happen to be standing at at the moment. All I can take away from it is a sense that all of the words were written to express the immediacy of pain and that nothing else matters, even how the pain is expressed.
   The individual poems all seem to come to similar degrees of anguish. In particular, a six-poem series of discharge notes seems to describe past pain over relationships (and names names), focusing on how everything still hurts.  discharge notes (ii) reads:

     a few years ago i decided i’d write
    a list of all the women i owe my life to
    even the women who have hurt me
    a lot like claudia. it was overwhelming
    not to write to carry so i deleted the
    phone note wrote a letter to claudia
    instead. gratefulness is so sore you can’t
    ever expect anyone to feel how they made you
    feel especially if they’ve never almost
    been dead. jean didn’t recognise my sister
    at the shop said you must have gone
     to school with amy but she looks so much
     like me even i see it now the way i
    still have a problem with things that just
    keep mattering like buying normal coke.

     jean’s gone home now anorexia went
    when I buried the tube in the ground
    doing well and gemma died that day  (p 24)

The blurb describes, ‘a hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation’, and this poem (quoted complete) is to me a fair example of this hunger in action, stream of consciousness in several streams, all coming together in a switch to a different topic.
     Words are our way of nailing down facts, and words are our way of expressing what is beyond words. I’d argue these as descriptions of prose and of poetry (and all the stages in between) – but I can’t fit these poems in. I feel that they need more shape. And I know perfectly well that this may be their strength, even though this reader feels left with an excess of raw material and the regret that there isn’t more structure to contain it.

Review by Mary Cresswell

Title: over under fed
Author: Amy Marguerite
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711642
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops

Hard life seen in hindsight

21/2/2025

A Bird in the Bush: From Fledgling to Flight
by Marnie Anstis

This appears to be a coming of age story, as suggested by the title, but not so much about birds taking off. A better analogy would be of someone who was firmly grounded on the land, even if the farmland in question reverted back to bush. Marnie Fabish, as she was then, revisits her late teenage diaries, and memories of a farm that her family owned in the Pakihi Valley, in the Bay of Plenty, in the early 1970s. It is really a story of ‘Girls can do anything’, and incredibly ‘hard yakka’ for her.
Marnie’s family were already established farmers in the Waikato, but her father fancied an extra property to develop, and later sell for a profit. That mostly relied on Marnie, and her older brother Len, doing an awful lot of unpaid labour during the periods in which they stayed on the farm in less than comfortable living. Marnie was a somewhat awkward, short-sighted, schoolgirl, who could not wait to leave after she achieved her School Cert pass. And so for the next 8 years she became a farmhand, a musterer, a ‘fleeco’ during the shearing, and many other things along the way.
But as she sees it in hindsight: “I had the opportunity to live an alternate lifestyle in a beautiful environment under the conservative umbrella of farming, without compromising my conventional beliefs.” It may be true that she had an alternate occupation, certainly compared to her former schoolmates in the towns, but such hard, unpaid work, doesn’t really seem like any kind of lifestyle. However, it is the charm of the book, and its matter-of-fact recollection, that makes it so compelling. Like many young women of her time she got to wear a bikini and bask in the sun in the Bay of Plenty; except that she did this on top of her favourite horse while getting her dogs to bring the sheep in.
Of course, those from a conservative farming background might say that this sort of work is a fairly standard expectation of those working in a family farm. But being so near the bush brings a few other challenges, from flooding to wrestling with wild pigs, confronting hunters who also might be poachers, and confronting local poachers who also turn out to be arsonists. Marnie finds one of the poachers to be a regular nuisance, and it becomes a criminal matter, with her being required to give evidence in a court case. And then their woolshed burns down and her horse goes missing.
It’s not only a hard life for her mother and sister, as they commute between farms, but there is also a toll taken on her father. She is quite open about the fact that her father spent a bit of money on tobacco and booze, and that its consumption changed his mood in a bad way. Like many farming fathers he would not live a long life. But she got through by getting attached to her farming friend, Peter, and their decision to get married in their early twenties proved to be wise. As she said to him, it was her main objective to have four children and more grandchildren, and she succeeded in this.

Review by S A Boyce

Title: A Bird in the Bush: From Fledgling to Flight
Author: Marnie Anstis
Publisher: Boots Books
ISBN: 9780473712884
RRP: $45
Available: bootsbooks.com

Climate change & social concerns at heart of novel

14/2/2025

Threads of Connection – a novel
by Jane Shearer

Jane Shearer’s second novel is set in Christchurch in the third decade of the 21st century, a time when the effects of climate change impinge upon daily life even more than they do at present. The novel suggests the presence of a substantial number of characters from her first novel, ‘Broken is Beautiful’ and this book presents a situation in which her earlier concerns with mental health are replaced by the struggle to conserve, protect and make optimum use of Earth’s dwindling resources.
In fact the battle against the causes of climate-induced social change is omnipresent, and leads, in the end, to something of an examination of such philosophical quandaries as the existence of ‘a just war’, ‘good vs evil’, ‘right vs wrong’ and the age-old question of whether or not the end justifies the means. In the context of the book these quandaries take the form of a decision to highlight the evils of climate change through the destruction of a laden coal-export ship at anchor in Lyttelton Harbour.
The phrase ‘in the end’, above, is used advisedly, for just on half the book is devoted to the author’s story-bearers and the interactions between them that provide the title. This brings their characters into sharp focus, and the model that Shearer has chosen for their relationship is very much that of the ‘web of inclusion’ promoted by Sally Helgesen in the 1990s, even if the book’s initial methods of achieving it are unnecessarily (but typically) politically correct and cumbersome.
Whatever the merits of this approach to organisation, two of the three principal movers and shakers using it emerge as Earth Mothers convinced of their right to enlighten and judge anyone whom they feel needs it because they need to be needed. Only Julia resonates with reality in her asserting that ‘We don’t need to help everyone’ after launching a successful help programme for deprived children.
However, her reservations in that regard meet the same club-wielding response as those concerned with the mandatory use of Maori karakia, waiata and vocabulary in contexts where English is otherwise used: that is, “Julia, which stone are you hiding under?” This remark, together with the assertion on the same page that, “...Sumner is still awfully white......” indicates that Shearer may not be fully on top of all of New Zealand’s social currents.
Moving on to the philosophical questions mentioned previously, though, the author does a much fairer job in portraying the response of her characters to the destruction of the coal ship, for their reactions vary from the enthusiastic support and involved complicity of the zealots to the stark horror at such illegality of those who recognise a greater duty to society. This mirrors the totality of the bemusement afflicting New Zealanders in the 1980s when ‘direct action’ both halted an international rugby match in one instance and sank a protest vessel only four years later. In both situations, the question of where one draws the line was well-asked if never solved.
‘Threads of Connection’ foreshadows a world that may well lie in wait for most of us but, as a recent government’s decision to halt New Zealand’s coal production in favour of importing foreign, and dirtier, coal demonstrated, dealing with our energy shortfalls will require action as well as identification.

Review by M J Burr

Title: Threads of Connection - a novel
Author: Jane Shearer
Publisher: 3Eyes Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-473-72330-9
RRP: $38.00
Available: Paperback available through Copypress
E-book available broadly on the internet, including Amazon

Extremely well constructed mystery

5/2/2025

Uncovered
by Jeannie McLean

This is the second Tova Tan Mystery written by Jeannie McLean and she has certainly raised the bar on the engrossing first offering. The events of the first tale are only hinted at here but with just enough detail that the books won't necessarily have to be read in order. Also just enough to encourage anyone who missed the first novel to want to know more.
An extremely well constructed piece with plenty of back story sitting with the characters giving the opportunity of red herrings and secondary plotlines. The drawing of the main characters was perfect, creating empathy for some and revulsion for others.
Ms Tan certainly lands up in some serious scrapes, this one the discovery of the remains of a murdered teenager, but seems capable of looking after herself (mostly) and sometimes thinking ahead of the police investigating the case.
As with the first tale, Caught Between, the pace is a perfect build through to the ‘final showdown’. A thoughtful wrap-up concludes with the opportunity for another Tova Tan Mystery as there is still family business to clear up.
This reader certainly hopes so. Another great read from Jeannie McLean, keep them coming please.

Review by George Hollinsworth

Title: Uncovered
Author: Jeannie McLean
Publisher: Cross the Ditch Press
ISBN: 978-0-473-73032-1 (paperback); 978-0-473-73033-8 (e-Pub)
RRP: $38.00
Available: Paperback: from realnzbooks.co.nz, Dear Reader Bookstore, and selected bookstores.
eBook: mebooks.co.nz, amazon.com

Novel well worth reading

28/1/2025

Swimming with Big Fish
by Julie Ryan

“Swimming with Big Fish” is a book that ultimately proved well worth reading. My background in the Navy, as an Engineer, and as a tourist in Russia left me initially confused and even baffled by the main character's rapid sequence of “questionable” decisions, and the initial character development might have been more thorough, but it was good enough, and the rapid plot development and complexity kept me reading.
There is a saying in writing that “bad decisions make good stories,” and in Dennis Bogdanovich, Julie Ryan has given us someone with an improbable capacity for bad decisions coupled with the good luck to survive them. As a result, this book is pretty good.
As noted, the initial pages left me with only a sketchy understanding of Dennis and his reasoning. I was uncertain of the source of the bad decisions, but the writing was good, and the plot quickly thickened.
The catastrophic destruction in London draws together the multiple stories and characters woven into this book, but the destruction itself is not central to the writing. The many supporting characters provide the strength and depth that make that part of the book a rewarding read. In both this and the beginning of the book, I desired more detail and a longer exposition. It was well but sparingly described, and I wanted more.
Dennis and his stubborn resistance to every form of authority provide a connecting thread for other characters and stories throughout the book. As he does this, he grows into his own story and comes into focus. It is, as I said, a good book. It differs somewhat from the faux “heroics” of my usual light reading, but I found it interesting and well done.
There are two more books in the series, and I will be reading them. That is my recommendation for this book.
It is worth the read.

A note for readers of Cyrillic languages:
There is a place where “ ’TaCKN’ with the N back to front” is offered for “TAKCИ.” This occurs only once early in the book, and the book progresses smoothly after it. It is a mundane editing issue but painful if encountered without warning.

Review by BJ Chippindale

Title: Swimming with Big Fish
Author: Julie Ryan
Publisher: Orakei Press,
ISBN: 978-0-473-70954-9
RRP: $40
Available: Fishpond.co.nz

Story of Hope in post-WWII Europe

19/1/2025

Death and the Dancing Girl
by Jenny Harrison

Death and the Dancing Girl is set in Britain and France shortly after World War II. Tom Blake is lost – his Special Operations role has ended, his estranged wife has died in a concentration camp, and he doesn’t know how to build a future. A visitor arrives – his wife’s brother – with news that his wife may be alive and also a daughter Tom never knew he had.
Tom’s search for his daughter and wife becomes his purpose. He traverses regions of post-war France in his quest. I found the descriptions of post-war times very interesting – I have read a lot more about the time of WWII than about the privation immediately following. The book contains an interesting array of characters who Tom meets along the way, including his volatile brother-in-law Lucien who grows, makes and sells wine. Tom discovers solace in working in the vineyard, despite being desperate to move on in his hunt.
Detailed descriptions of places are strength in Death and the Dancing Girl. The writing makes it easy to imagine both the remaining beauty and the struggles of the post-war era. There was, perhaps, a little too much agonising over the loss of a daughter about whom Tom knew nothing and had never met. However, if you have little in your life, you could easily become obsessed by an unknown ray of hope.
Overall, Death and the Dancing Girl is an easy read which keeps you wanting to know…why Tom is in his situation, whether daughter Sophie and Madeleine are still alive, where they might be if they are alive. To find out the answers, read the book!

Review by Jane Shearer

Title: Death and the Dancing Girl
Author: Jenny Harrison
Publisher: Lamplighter Press
ISBN: 978-0-473-72623-2
RRP: $32.99
Available: print & e-book from [email protected]

Collection from ‘Man of Letters’

4/12/2024

Table Talk – Opinions, stories, and a play
by C.K. Stead

Karl Stead doesn’t use many sports metaphors in his writing, but as it’s a good summer read, we could call him an ‘all-rounder’ in his latest book. He writes that it is intended for book people, especially groups (not cricket teams), but there is non-fiction and short fiction here; and he is the veteran who remains ‘not out’, when so many of his contemporaries have left the crease for good.
Many New Zealand book people will be familiar with his approach, but in this book he goes right back to the 1950s, to complete his novice version of a play called Andromache; he also seems to have written another version as a short story, innocuously titled ‘A Family Man’, for this book. Are we looking at a compendium of his favoured themes over the intervening years, or a miscellany?
Part 1 includes short essays, reviews, book launch speeches, reader reports, and also blog posts, which are easy to read and involve a variety of interesting subjects. These cover all sorts of writers, including some almost forgotten poets, like Hubert Witheford and Pat Wilson, who both ended up in England. But beyond the literary figures, and technicalities of poetry writing, we find interesting essays on the artist Louise Henderson, and Stead’s extraordinary encounters with the legend of Barry Humphries and a number of his wives. There is also a lot of depth on the generation of male professors who dominated the humanities at Auckland University, and some more on their wives.
For those of us interested in humanities, and especially political history, Stead’s blog posts on the ‘Sinclair Cohort’ and the ‘1922 Brigade’, or the three K.S.s, are fascinating. The other two K.S.s are Keith Sinclair (History) and Kendrick Smithyman (English); while Bob Chapman (Politics) and the writer Maurice Duggan also feature. Helen Clark makes a fleeting appearance, as a badminton playing partner, and in the coterie around Chapman (which also includes the MP Roger Douglas). So there is certainly an intellectual milieu at work here, and one which was enormously influential in Labour Party machinations at the time, if not well-versed in socialist history, apart from Smithyman.
It is also worth mentioning the essay written for this volume, ‘Borges and Me’. A strange title, especially since it is about an American academic, Jay Parini, who wrote Borges and Me, about his time driving the poet Borges around Scotland while a PhD student. Stead had read Borges’ work in the late 1960s, and had also driven a poet around Scotland, Edwin Muir, but that was ten years prior. The connection seems to be that Parini was a draft-dodger, during the Vietnam War, and that period has been an obsession for Stead, culminating in his writing Smith’s Dream. While it was filmed as Sleeping Dogs, he views it as a literary failure (despite being a commercial success).
Stead’s short fiction often seems to include an ex-patriate New Zealand man, usually an academic, encountering great public figures in Europe. Indeed, in ‘Vladimir’, the character enjoys a car journey with Putin before arriving at a function attended by the English playwright Tom Stoppard, who was actually from Czechia. In Stead’s story ‘Philosopher’s Kiss’, his Kiwi academic has an encounter with the renowned Cambridge philosopher Wittgenstein, not long before his death, but it doesn’t seem very convincing. In ‘A Short History of New Zealand’ he has an ex-pat Kiwi journalist interview a younger female author about a book with that title, which is actually fiction. And the fictional text is quoted at length as part of the story. It seems unlikely that this text, about a Pakeha policeman pursuing a Maori thief in a rural settlement, would have been published under that title and with all the expletives added, especially by a female author. Not now anyway, or perhaps that is the point?
But, of course, we can forgive C.K. Stead for some idiosyncratic fiction writing, and a fixation on his experiences in 1960s Britain, as he remains the last standing ‘Man of Letters’ from that period.

Review by S A Boyce

Title: Table Talk – Opinions, stories, and a play
Author: C.K. Stead
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781991103307
RRP: $45.00
Available: bookshops

Inner city Intrigue

21/11/2024

Love in Lockdown
by K. F. Fleming

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to spend our 2020 lockdown with people you didn’t really like or even hardly knew?
In Oak Tree Lodge, a boutique central Auckland boarding house, on the eve of 25th March, 2020, three mismatched tenants – Roz, Frank and Julius – are preparing to spend the coming weeks in isolation from the rest of their quirky neighbourhood. Their only other companion is Leo, their landlord. He lives upstairs and, as we soon learn, he’s a pervert, delusional, and worse. There is a fourth room, but Chelsea went out 2 weeks ago and hasn’t come back. A few hours before lockdown begins, backpacker Meg turns up, desperate for somewhere to stay. Putting her in Chelsea’s room is a bonus for Leo – a last-minute opportunity to have a tenant in the best room in the house.
“Based on Real Events” claims the Love in Lockdown subtitle. Unless a series of inner-city murders were hushed up at the time, this statement thankfully only refers to the worries that people experienced during the pandemic; the tensions that developed in less-than-perfect relationships and the restrictions that were placed on personal freedom. The pandemic’s evolution in New Zealand and the lockdown regulations are reported accurately throughout.
Leo narrates the story. His cutting descriptions of Roz, Frank and Julius contrast with his rose-tinted relationship with Meg. This latter is sharply offset by other, more personal and disturbing details that he shares with us. His chatty narration is easy to read but his dark, apparently throw-away revelations mean that a sense of growing danger pervades the weird, strained atmosphere in the boarding house.
Despite the seemingly bizarre storyline, Fleming’s pithy writing, interspersed with irony and humour, has created an entertaining read with the final pieces in the puzzle only falling into place in the final pages.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie

Title: Love in Lockdown
Author: K F Fleming
Publisher: UK Small Publisher
ISBN: 9781916613102
RRP: $29.95
Available: bookshops

Magnificent record, fitting tribute and work of art

14/11/2024

Force of Nature
Te Aumangea o te Ao Tūroa
A conservation history of Forest & Bird 1923-2023
by David Young, Naomi Arnold
with Caroline Wood, Michael Pringle

How do you review a book like this, given that its 364 pages of text plus additional material contain more knowledge than one can hope to absorb in weeks of reading?
To begin with, it’s an admirable tour de force by the Forest & Bird Society, and no doubt also a labour of love by the authors credited and many others who have contributed to put together this history of conservation in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
As is appropriate, the volume is physically beautiful – large format hardback, on quality paper, lavishly illustrated by photos. It would be a glib assessment for anyone to term it a coffee-table book though it would certainly grace any such table, because it is so much more than that.
Thousands of New Zealanders will find within its pages satisfaction not only at learning more of the work of Forest & Bird, but finding acknowledgement of how much has been given in terms of time, resources and expertise by so many citizens over the past hundred years.
Growing up the daughter of one of its avid members and volunteer workers dedicated to the principles the Society stands for, I thought I was reasonably familiar with at least part of its work during those years, but this book puts that mere slice of background into much wider perspective with a full account of the aims and achievements since its beginnings.
In fact, the account starts prior to 100 years ago for the first society of that name was formed in 1914. The opening chapter deals with the early history of the Society, paying tribute to those foresighted people who recognized more than a century ago the desirability and need to protect this country’s natural resources.
Personally for me, it was a joy to read particularly in Chapter 2, Protection’s Voice in a Post-War Economy, of people I knew in my childhood, many of them met at family camps held between 1953 and 1983 – professional and amateur experts in our unique environment, active members and supporters of the Society in their time, now all gone.
Chapter 3, Breakthrough: Islands as Sanctuaries will be where even more readers find much to spark their memories or create interest as it records the wonderful work done by countless New Zealanders to establish sanctuaries for birds and other native species on islands around our coasts. This book then, also serves to pay tribute to their contributions.
Likewise, Chapter 4, Our Reflective Past: Rivers, Wetlands and Lakes, records the prodigious efforts of workers and volunteers to overcome threats to such treasures as Manapouri, Whanganui River and other natural taonga.
Chapter 5, Defining the Bush: Claiming Our Wilderness continues the account of the work done by the Society from 1973 to 2002; followed by Coming of Age: Legislation as Revolution 1980-2023.
And that’s just the first half of the volume. Further sections deal with the marine environment, the ongoing work to make this country predator-free, the effects of human-caused pressures, then looking forward to the future.
Full endnotes, acknowledgements and an index complete the work.
Complementing this impressive and beautiful book are plenty of illustrations, some honouring people who contributed so much to the Society and to whom much is owed for their work, plus stunning photos of places, flora and fauna.
Altogether, Force of Nature is a magnificent record, and a fitting tribute to all involved, past and present. It is also a work of art.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: Force of Nature, Te Aumangea o te Ao Tūroa
A conservation history of Forest & Bird
Authors: David Young, Naomi Arnold with Caroline Wood, Michael Pringle
Publisher: Potton & Burton
ISBN: 9781988550701
RRP: $90
Available: https://shop.forestandbird.org.nz; NZ bookshops

Cannot be praised enough

7/11/2024

Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
by Deidre Brown & Ngarino Ellis,
with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki

WOW! What a beautiful monster of a book. Not solely through its massive weight and plenitude of pages, but more significantly – indeed far more significantly – because of its inherent kaupapa. He aha tēnā? To comprehensively present, for the first time, an encyclopaedic overview of all the many interrelated and interpolated aspects of Māori artistic endeavour from pre-European times to the present and the inchoate future.
Accordingly and inevitably, it is so mighty a tome because Māori have always had at the forefront of such endeavour, whether it be whakairo, moko, raranga, kākahu, whatu, te mea te mea te mea, these as integral living components of everyday life whereby past, present and future are not linear concepts but are a holistic always-current and interwoven panoply. As such, because there is just so much material to present – via cogent and sometimes cutting commentaries concerning Pākeha appropriation of ngā toi Māori, and via a myriad of coloured plates and photographs – the volume is gargantuan.
This vital volume is divided into three key sections, and several subsections within each of these. Te Kete Tuatea equates to pre-European customary artistan involvement. Te Kete Tuauri relates to the inevitable adjustment age and stage when European arrival and disruption and what I can only call larceny, seismically shifted Indigenous qua Māori creations and creativity. Te Kete Aronui relates to more recent times, events and exhibitions and continues to amplify what for me will happen with an increasing and necessary frequency, and that is international recognition of ngā toi Māori katoa as sui generis, and as intrinsically important. With this masterpiece and as the three kaituhi-kaitiaki articulate in their Whakamutunga/Conclusion they have already gifted the world comprehensive evidence of a ‘global domination of Māori art history’.
I amplify this last statement by pointing out that the authors forcefully stress that ngā toi Maōri in several variegated formats, is suffused by three consistent themes, namely whenua, tikanga, whakapapa. For me, as so expertly evidenced in this book, it is an expression of an entirely different Weltanschauung, albeit ongoingly modified over decades, that Māori are existentially authentic and original and must be accorded this elemental fact. As here stressed by the key progenitor of this years-long project, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, when delineating (Māori) Indigeneity, ‘whose identity is unique and defined by the geographical compass within which they operate, and ancient and ancestral ties to place’. Ko te pono tēnā.
Obviously then, I cannot praise this magnum opus enough. It is essential reading and will remain for me he taonga into which I will continue to dip and delve and always learn from. For example, I now know about another harbinger Māori, Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury, ‘the first Maōri fine arts academic’. As a marked counterpoint I gleaned more about ‘Fakes in the collection’ when non-Māori profited grandly by producing counterfeit ‘Māori art’. Relatedly, I garnered more insight pertaining to the heinous trade in toi moko and kōiwi tangata, and trust that Toi Te Mana is causative in the return of the over 600 ancestors ‘still waiting to come home’. Here. Where they belong.
Tēnā koutou katoa mō tēnei pukapuka. He taonga waiwai. Ka maharatia tēnei e ahau taea noatia tōku matenga.

Review by Vaughan Rapatahana
(Te Ātiawa)

Title: Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
Authors: Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409197
RRP: $99.99
Available: bookshops