Saturday 28 October 2017




VOLUME EDITIONS.  The pieces that comprise the first three titles of our new series of short interesting texts came to us unbidden in various ways, but each demonstrates the strong connection between memory, identity and place. We are very pleased to be launching our publishing imprint with such excellent work.

VOL 001: Overcoats by Eddie Saxon     $5
A short autobiography of a long life, told through a succession of overcoats.

VOL 002: Two Visits to Auschwitz by Bernard Redshaw and Michelanne Forster     $5
Two visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp end in silence.

VOL 003: Transit in Marrakech by David Coventry     $5
A travelling writer makes an unexpected connection with a customs official in Marrakech. 









BOOKS @ VOLUME   #47

Our newsletter (28.10.17)

Issued on NZ Bookshop Day. 








Very many thanks to all of you who helped us celebrateNZ Bookshop Day and the importance of your bookshop to your community. We were overwhelmed with the range of book-positive and bookshop-positive activities you thought up and undertook. Thank you for coming in to see us, bringing in your friends, bringing us coffee and cake and flowers, posting about us on social media, photographing yourselves and your family reading, singing us songs, buying books, making us drawings and models, reading to us from your favourite books, participating in our Man Booker discussion, attending the launch of our publications, photoshopping us into the Nelson Masked Parade(!), and telling us some really awful literary jokes. The winner of our Bookshop Bingo draw and recipient of a six-month VOLUME Reading Subscription is Amy Shattock. Many thanks to all entrants!   A bookshop is the expression of the passion of its community. 






Our Book of the Week this week is La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman, the first book of 'The Book of Dust', the eagerly awaited new series set in the same universe as 'His Dark Materials'. 

>> Read Stella's review below.

>> Two other books from Lyra's world: Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North

>> Daemon Voices (Pullman on storytelling).

>> La Belle Sauvage is also available in hardback. 

>> "The philosophical underpinning of this book is deeply concerned with how authoritarian regimes take power."

>> Pullman: "'The Book of Dust' is about Dust. ... 'The Book of Dust' is not a sequel or a prequel but an equel."

>> 5 minutes with Philip Pullman

>> The Golden Compass film was based on Northern Lights. 

>> On Dust

>> He's already finished writing the sequel! 

>> Some other books by Pullman

Review by STELLA: 
The first in 'The Book of Dust' trilogy is a triumph. I sat down and read it in one sitting and there was no way anything was going to interrupt me (you have been warned!). It’s been almost 20 years since The Amber Spyglass, the third book in 'His Dark Materials' series, and leaving the world of Lyra was difficult for many. La Belle Sauvage is set 10 years before Northern Lights, Lyra is a baby in the care of the nuns at Godstow near Oxford. We are back in the world of daemons, the struggle between the religious order and scientific learning, and the mysterious questions about Dust. The Magisterium’s power is growing in Brytain and there is an increasing sense of unease in the populace. Here we meet Malcolm, an eleven-year-old boy - curious, inventive and good. He helps out at his parent’s pub, clearing glasses and scrubbing pots, he lends a hand to the nuns across the river and it is here he comes across Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon. While 'His Dark Materials' references Milton’s Paradise Lost, this series belongs to Spenser’s Faerie Queen, with touches of the Biblical Great Flood and Gothic storytelling. It feels like all the questions you still had as a reader after completing the previous trilogy are now going to be visited again, amplified - and maybe some answers might be forthcoming. While many of the characters are familiar, we learn more about them and their ambitions. Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, is ever more daunting and compelling and Lord Asriel, her father, maddening and heroic. We are introduced to the fledgling secret organisation formed to resist the fascist and fanatical power-keepers, and the wonderful Hannah Reif, a reader of the wonderful Alethiometer, as well as the strange and dangerously obsessive former scientist who haunts Malcolm. Malcolm is drawn into a world which becomes increasingly dangerous and complex, and his loyalty toward the child is undaunting. As tensions rise, so do the rivers. It rains and rains, and Malcolm, tipped off by a Gyptian, readies his boat, the beautiful canoe, La Belle Sauvage, keeping an eye on the welfare of the child, Lyra. He rescues her as the walls of the nunnery collapse, and, along with the tough and mealy-mouthed Alice, who works at the pub, they start a journey down the Thames, across a flooded Brytain, in swift and dangerous currents. It’s a perilous journey physically, emotionally and mentally, stretching the youths to the edges of their capabilities. Pullman pulls no punches with La Belle Sauvage, with its allegorical layers and deliberations on science, religion and the psyche. It's dark, compelling and incredibly intriguing. Complex, intelligent writing for children, teens and adults alike. 





















Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman    {Reviewed by STELLA}
With a title so emphatically sure of itself, you know that something is up and you are curious to find out what. Gail Honeyman’s debut novel,Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, draws you in immediately. You meet Eleanor - an unusual woman in her thirties who lives alone works in an office (the same place she’s been since she finished university), and follows her own particular set of rules which result in an austere, simple life devoid of indulgence or frivolities, friends or family. As we travel alongside Eleanor, some peculiarities come to our attention: she drinks cheap vodka from Friday night until work on Monday and has a weekly call from Mummy on a Wednesday - an event that fills her with increasing discomfort. What starts as a quirky, amusing tale about an oddity becomes more endearing as Eleanor Oliphant becomes besotted with a musician, someone the reader sees clearly for what he is, but poor Eleanor is blind to. Yet this obsession is the making of her: as she plans her fantasy relationship she inadvertently becomes connected with the world around her. This is helped by a coincidental incident where she, along with her workmate Raymond, help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street. This incident leads to a budding friendship with Raymond, an unusual situation for Eleanor, who has never had a friend. As the story goes along, we begin to build a clearer picture of our heroine. Her childhood in foster homes, her contact with social workers, and her horrendous mother. The first part of this novel is called Good Days and we sense that Eleanor is running from something, living in a bubble to protect herself from a past that is haunting her. Honeyman keeps the tone light in this part, with gags, most visited upon and by Eleanor with her odd behaviour and often inappropriate remarks. The final third is the Bad Days, where Eleanor’s fantasy world has crumbled and the influence of Mummy looks as if it might destroy her. But Eleanor Oliphant (not her real name) is made of sterner stuff and while the reveal at the end is a shocker, this novel is ultimately a charmer (even when dealing with the damaging consequences of a disturbing childhood) which embraces the life-affirming power of friendship and care.






































Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno     {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Writing is a way not to remember but to forget,” suggests Kate Zembrano in this book concerning both her grieving for her mother and her struggle to be free of her mother, who in some ways became more dominating after her death than she was when alive. “Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind,” continues Zembrano. The past dominates the present, not so much in the way in which the present is disposed as in the disposition of our minds towards it: that which we are foolish enough to think of as ourself is dependent utterly upon memory, upon the power of what is not us in the past. This dominance by the lost and unreachable (we cannot assail its moment of power for it lies against the flow of time) is most oppressive when we are unaware of it. Paradoxically, we need to remember in order to escape the past and exist more freely (if existing freely is our predilection). But merely to open ourselves to the past through memory is insufficient to free ourselves of it. To gain control it is necessary to assume authorship, not to change what we cannot reach against time, but to create a simulacrum that is experienced in the place of the experience of the past, a replacement that alters the grammar of our servitude, simultaneously a remembering and a forgetting. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it. I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them,” said Louise Bourgeois. Since her mother’s death, Zembrano’s thoughts have been increasingly focussed on her loving but dominating mother, to the extent that her mother is taking over her life (“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out. A parlour trick”). Very possibly, this influence was operative when her mother was alive, but it was at least concentrated in a person who could be interacted with and reacted against. Now “she is everywhere by being unable to be located.” Zambreno’s perceptive book is a study, through self-scrutiny, of the ambivalences of grief and of memory, and also of a path beyond grief: “If writing is a way of hoarding memories - what does it also mean to write to disown?” Not that either remembering or forgetting does any favours to the departed. Without an actual person upon whom an identity, a history, a character may be postulated, and without the generation of new information, however minor, that is possible only by living, the definition of that person belongs to anyone and no-one. Identity becomes contested in the absence of the arbiter. What remains but the impress, somewhere in the past, the shape of which must henceforth suffice as a stand-in for the departed? For better or for worse the pull is to the past, towards the unalterable occurrences that have what could almost be considered as a will to persist through whatever has received their impress. And the struggle for authorship is complicated by the persistence of objects. Death instantaneously transforms the everyday into an archive. Zembrano’s visits to her parents’ house in the years after the death of her mother brings her into contact with objects that have lost their ordinariness, the possessions of her mother’s that her father wishes to enshrine, objects that have stultified, that have not been permitted to either lose or accrete meaning. Both comfort and trap, the archive preserves the dominance of the pastper se, preserves the fact of loss more than that which has been lost. Advances in medical science have meant that more of our lives, and more of the end period of our lives, has come to be defined by illness. Increasingly few of us reach our end without being overwritten by the story of its approach. Zembrano captures well her mother’s struggle with the disease that killed her, not so much over the her survival or otherwise as over how she would be remembered, over whether the idea others had of her would be replaced by the story of a disease. All memory proceeds as a scuffle between selection and denial, between nostalgia and resentment, between freedom and attachment, between the conflicting needs of actuality and representation. Memory is the first requirement of forgetting. 















My Private Property by Mary Ruefle    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
What is a reader to do when confronted with a set of short, various prose pieces written by a poet who has reached the other side of cleverness and who approaches the inarticulateness beyond from the bank of her accomplishments rather than from that of incapacity? To the problems attendant upon the *facts* of her existence Ruefle applies questions that are inextinguishable by answers. Many of the pieces in My Private Propertyread almost as encyclopedia entries to the ordinary, cataloguing its wonders for some alien to whom the quotidian and the unusual have equal strangeness. This cleansing of the faculties of the grime of familiarity is the essence of the poetic mode. The subjective is left immediate/unmediated, revealing and affirming the value of individual experience and demonstrating the particular, however ordinary, as the haunt of meaning, the profundity of which is not limited by the fact that it does not extend beyond the confines of its domain. There is little of value to be had from a generalisation. In this set of exemplars in a science of the particular, the said subjectivity, isolated as a distillate, is poured by Ruefle into successive containers other than herself, with no loss of efficacy, and it is this transmigration of viewpoint that gives the pieces of My Private Property an exhilaration, a poignancy and a liberty that demonstrate poetry’s essentially astringent quality upon the impediments of identity that cloud our sympathies and shorten our perceptions. 


Friday 27 October 2017


NEW RELEASES

They're new.
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa        $45
A fragmentary "factless autobiography" attributed by Pessoa largely to his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares but left unedited and uncompleted (if such a project could be completed) at Pessoa's (and, by extension, Soares's) death. The book is a Modernist masterpiece of existential observation and self-observation, with musings on the scattershot distribution of meaning in everyday life. 
>> "The weirdest autobiography ever."
>> "A writer in flight from his name.
>>  On the destruction of the 'I'.
False River: Stories, essays, secret histories by Paula Morris        $35
Fiction addresses itself to fact and fact addresses itself to fiction. These pieces range all over the place, occasionally observing themselves transforming from essay to fiction (or vice-versa), asking themselves, and us, what is the nature, or value, of truth? 
The Little Library Cookbook by Kate Young        $45
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol). 
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck          $33
"Jenny Erpenbeck's magnificent novel is about the 'central moral question of our time,' and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling 'moving' stories about people who are very different from us. Erpenbeck writes about Richard, a retired German academic, whose privileged, orderly life is transformed by his growing involvement in the lives of a number of African refugees—utterly powerless, unaccommodated men, who have ended up, via the most arduous routes, in wealthy Germany. Erpenbeck uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward." — James Wood, New Yorker
"Profound, unsettling and subtle." - The Guardian
From the author of Visitation and The End of Days
The Extravagant Stranger: A memoir by Daniel Roy Connelly        $40
"These are glowing, moving prose poems of hallucinatory intensity. The wit and bracing honesty of the memories, from awkward to adulatory, take you through a powerfully personal journey (for the reader as much as the writer) in each poem and in the sequence overall. The sense of timing is exquisite. A masterclass in how to turn a scene, a moment, so that it catches the light just so in the final sentence. Connelly combines the autobiographical courage of Heaney and Hill with the symbolic technique and the reach and ambition of the French masters of the form and the effect is mesmerising." - Luke Kennard
Animals Among Us: The new science of anthrozoology by John Bradshaw         $50
Why do humans keep and cherish some animals i their homes and yet regard others as a source of food or sport? Our relationship with animals tells us much about our own nature as a species and as individuals. A thoughtful and enjoyable book. 
Stories: The collected short fiction and True Stories: The collected short non-fiction by Helen Garner     $37 / $48
As it says. Nice dustwrappered hardbacks.
"Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses. Her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive." - James Wood, New Yorker 
Daemon Voices: Essays on storytelling by Philip Pullman         $38
Interesting and enjoyable considerations of storymaking from the author of 'His Dark Materials', 'The Book of Dust', 'Sally Lockhart', &c. 

>>>>> The hardback edition of La Belle Sauvage is now in stock
The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler        $40
99 literary sensations whose stars have set are re-elevated in this charming book. 
1947: When now begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink      $38
The world had to reboot itself after the Second World War, but what was to be saved, what could be rebuilt, and what was to be made entirely new? In the first few years of relocations, reinventions and redirections set in place many of the tropes that have defined the world since. In 1947, production began of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior created the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, the first computer bug is discovered, the CIA is set up, Hassan Al-Banna drew up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN committee was given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine. 
Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A brief history of capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis           $35
What is money and why does debt exist? Where do wealth and inequality come from? How come economics has the power to shape and destroy our lives? An excellent primer, using stories to explain and question the drivers of society. 
""The reason Varoufakis seems to have captured the imaginations of so many is that his words about the European crisis speak universal truths about democracy, capitalism and social policy." - Guardian 
The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe       $30
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.  
The Japanese Garden by Sophie Walker        $110
A comprehensive exploration of the concepts behind eight centuries of development of specifically Japanese garden aesthetic. A beautifully produced book. 
"The act of seeing, and the concentration of seeing, takes an effort. The gardens impose that effort on you if you want to see them. It's another way of ordering your vision, and it slows down your vision." - Richard Serra
>> See sample pages
Clementine Loves Red by Krystyna Boglar        $22
It's the end of the holidays for Mark, Annie and Pudding. They've spent the summer in a cottage on the edge of a forest in the countryside, but they haven't had any really exciting adventures to tell their classmates back at school... Until, on their final visit to see the Frog King of a nearby pond, they find a frightened young girl crying in the woods. The curiously named Macadamia tells them she has lost Clementine, and so the three children set out on a quest to find her. But they are not the only ones looking for Clementine, and a storm is approaching, bringing with it a night full of surprises.
The Well-Tempered City: What modern science, ancient civilisations, and human nature teach us about the future of urban life by Jonathan F.P. Rose        $40
A properly functioning city should be able to address the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century. 
>> It is all a matter of tuning


Out of the Wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis by George Monbiot         $27
The neoliberal experiment has brought society and the environment to the brink of disaster (and for many, over the brink). But humans are characterised not as much by competitive individualism as by altruism and co-operation. How can these be built into a politics that addresses the crises the world currently faces? 
Black Barn: Portrait of a place by Gregory O'Brien and Jenny Bornholdt, photographs by Brian Culy       $85
Text and poetry by outstanding writers, atmospheric photography and memorable recipes from the Hawke's Bay vineyard/retreat/bistro known as Black Barn. 
The Parthenon Enigma: A journey into legend by Joan Breton Connelly      $35
Postulates the Parthenon as the focus of cult rituals focussed on human sacrifice and emphasising the difference of Classical civiclisations from the succeeding Western Christian centuries. 
Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution edited by Margarette Lincoln       $50
A portrait of the late Stuart age, lavishly illustrated with art and objects associated with Pepys and his diaries. 


Why We Sleep: The new science of sleep and dreams by Matthew Walker      $55
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep. Until very recently, science had only cursory answers to the questions of why we sleep, what good it served, and why its absence is so damaging to our health. Can increasing the amount and quality of our sleep improve our lives?


Reminiscences of a Long Life by John Logan Campbell        $90
An Auckland city father's won account of his life, from his birth in Edinburgh in 1817, and covering much of the civic development of Auckland, lavishly illustrated throughout with artworks from his collections. 
Theatre of Dreams, Theatre of Play: Nō and Kyōgen in Japan by Khan Trinh et al        $45
An impressive collection of masks, costumes, instruments, set paintings and objects provides an excellent introduction to the practices of Noh and Kyogen threatre and their importance in Japanese cultural history. 
Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir by Tom Scott       $45
Scott is one of New Zealand's favourite and longest-serving political cartoonists, columnists and satirists. Find out about the many unsuspected facets of his life. 


To Catch a King: Charles II's great escape by Charles Spencer       $38
When his attempt to invade England as King of Scotland ended in defeat by the Republic's forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles managed to elude capture (despite the difficulty in disguising such a recognisable man) for over six weeks and escape to exile in Europe. 
The Song from Somewhere Else by A.F. Harrold, illustrated by Levi Pinfold       $19
When Frank is rescued from bullies by the misfit Nick, she makes a friend whose possession of strange secrets leads Frank to discover there is more to life than she had thought. 
"Extraordinary. As moving, strange and profound as Skellig." - Guardian
Birdmania: A remarkable passion for birds by Bernd Brunner       $40
Looking at people who like looking at birds tells as much about people as about birds. Brunner has written an interesting history of an obsession. 
"An exquisitely beautiful book. These stories about birds are ultimately reflections on the curious nature of humanity itself." - Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Vintage Menswear: A collection from the Vintage Showroom by Josh Sims, Douglas Gunn and Roy Luckett         $35
Includes an excellent selection of rarely seen exemplars of veteran workwear. Lots of fresh style inspiration here. 
A World of Three Zeroes: The new economics of zero poverty, zero unemployment and zero carbon emissions by Muhammad Yunus        $38
In the decade since Yunus first began to articulate his ideas for a new model of economics, thousands of companies, nonprofits, and individual entrepreneurs around the world have embraced them. From Albania to Colombia, India to Germany, newly created businesses and enterprises are committed to reducing poverty, improving health care and education, cleaning up pollution, and serving other urgent human needs in ingenious, innovative ways. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in alleviating poverty. 
The Anna Karenina Fix: Life lessons from Russian literature by Viv Groskop           $38
Can the Russian classics provide guidance on the personal conundrums of modern life? Possibly. Fun. 



Explore! Aotearoa by Bronwen Wall       $30
Kupe! Thomas Brunner! Freda du Faur! Kieran McKay! Kelly Tarlton! Other people!


Uncommon Type: Some stories by Tom Hanks        $37
Actor Tom Hanks cherishes his collection of vintage typewriters so much that he has written seventeen stories, each featuring a vintage typewriter. 
>> A love affair with vintage typewriters


I.P.A: A legend in our time by Roger Protz        $40
A very full history of and guide to the notable India Pale Ales of the world.  
The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young       $23
An observant farmer, Young suggests that there is much we can learn from cattle. 
"Delightful. It alters the way one looks at the world."- Alan Bennett












Wednesday 25 October 2017



Featured publisher: HARD PRESS
Hard Press is an independent publishing house committed to publishing peripheral and experimental writing not limited to, nor benefiting from, any established convention.
>> Visit the Hard Press website
To the Roaring Thing Blended by Dan Nash       $20
Dan Nash's collection of poetry and drawings explores the possibilities of the mind and writing in the liminal space before sleep. Filled with violence, fantasy and tenderness, these prose poems are as unsettling as they are absurdly comical, perverting our desires, the momentary banality of life, and possibilities of poetic meaning.


Girl Teeth by Manon Revuelta       $20
Manon Revuelta’s collection of poetry and prose writing Girl Teeth conspicuously explores her relationship to the past and its interventionist hum on in the present. Coupling the openness of poetic imagining with intimate essayistic portraits of progenitors, this collection exposes the mechanics of language, the body, and how we might imagine a place in the world with all that has come before to which we’re bound. 
Ginesthoi by Evangeline Riddiford Graham        $20
The only words generally accepted to be actually written by Cleopatra VII of Egypt herself are “ginesthoi” or “make it so”, signing off a series of tax exemptions for Publius Canidius, one of Mark Antony’s generals. Although the exemptions and privileges are unromantic, and ordinary enough for a Ptolmaic court, the legendary and literary loading of the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony freight these words with subtexts and implications that exceed their denotation. The correlation or disjunction of inclination and obligation, of power and desire, of declaration and implication are themes that run also through Ginesthoi, a collection of poems by Evangeline Riddiford Graham published by the tiny and interesting Hard Press in Auckland. Presented as a series of fragments, much in the manner of the scraps of text discovered by archeologists, these poems are partial unearthings of an emotional life as intent upon concealing itself as it is upon revealing. What are we make of these twists of words, half earnest, half mocking, leaping back and forth across millennia, overlapping past and present while simultaneously reinforcing and dissolving the distinction between the two? There are two moments of awareness, one sealed in the past, encased in a museum cabinet or a memory, isolated from its context but preserved beyond a healthy span, resonating compulsively in its isolation until it has become little more than this resonation, and the other pausing in the present, gazing at the artefact in its current out-of-context context, attempting to make contact with the past moment, the past awareness or experience, to catch its eye, to pretend that the past reciprocates the gaze, or glimpse, or at least entertains the possibility of such a gaze or glimpse, to make believe, even to believe, if one can make oneself believe, that one can be not only aware of oneself in the past but that that past self can be somehow aware of the present self being aware of it, a game of memory working in both directions. In fact this is what we always do with memory: we are caught in a trap of tense, completed actions in the past are restrained there, playing in our memories or in our imaginations, if memories and imaginations can be distinguished from one another, but sealed in the perfect tense, whereas, though our present awareness may enter this case, cast itself backwards, project itself into the past, it can do so only at the expense of losing the capacity to act, to make things different to any effective degree. Expression is always ambivalent: to share a thought is to isolate oneself, to shut oneself within that thought; or, rather, perhaps, expression is quadrivalent: to share a thought is to shut oneself within that thought but, as the sharing of a thought is dependent upon a medium which necessarily replaces whatever is it applied to, both for the one to whose thought the medium is applied and the one, either specified or more generally implicated, to whom the sharing is directed, the act of sharing creates always a counterfeit artefact, at best a gloss, or label, upon the authenticity it causes to be lost. If poetry is the archeology of subjective experience, the poems of Ginesthoi are artefacts with all the clarity, obscurity and productive ambiguity of the papyrus fragment of Cleopatra VII to which they so playfully refer. {Review by THOMAS}
>> Some photographs from Evangeline Riddiford Graham's recent reading at VOLUME. 






Saturday 21 October 2017



BOOKS @ VOLUME #46
Our latest NEWSLETTER (21.10.17).
Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what's happening at VOLUME on N.Z. BOOKSHOP DAY.
Find out about some interesting new releases.
Find out about other things you'll have to click through to find out about.