‘It is January 2009, high summer again. I am pushing to finish the poems which have almost the shape of a book that will trace a path through the year of writing that is my work for the living.’something strange happens every day: throughout 2008 Michele Leggott recorded her term as the first New Zealand Poet Laureate. The result is Mirabile Dictu, her new collection of poetry, in which she relates the wonders of her year. The poems in Mirabile Dictu are gifts; they are lush and supple; they glory in language; they go ‘looking for a good time’ and find ‘the breathing world’. In this warm and wonderful collection Leggott is a daily traveller, crafter of words and maker of fire.

ISBN 978 1 86940 440 6, 230 x 165mm, paperback with flaps, 160 pages, $27.99.

This important book explores for the first time the 150-year-old relationship between New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori and the Chinese, that country’s earliest and largest non-European immigrant group. Do Maori resent Chinese immigrants? Do Chinese New Zealanders understand the role of the tangata whenua (people of the land)? Have Maori and Chinese formed alliances based on common values and history? Contributors tackle such questions from many angles. They examine how Maori newspapers portrayed Chinese and how the Chinese media portray Maori; the changing demography of the Chinese and Maori populations; Maori-Chinese marriages and the ancient migration of both groups. The result is a rich portrait of the past and present relationships and a rich and complex social fabric.

ISBN 978 1 86940 436 9, 210 x 140mm, paperback, 360 pages approx, $49.99.

How does music hold us up? The Blind Singer dances and shimmers around ‘the heart of our hearing’, weighing up what might be lost to those who are always busy with their eyes. Price works legend, history, biography, art and the secret lives of musical instruments into her poetic narratives, including ‘The Angel Question’, a stunning sequence written for the science-literature project ‘Are Angels OK?’ It is a luminous performance that continues to reverberate in the head long after the reading is over.

ISBN 978 1 86940 433 8, 210 x 138mm, paperback with dust jacket, 96 pages, $24.99.

Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation is the first substantial survey of the work of New Zealand’s leading abstract painter, Milan Mrkusich. At the beginning of his career in the 1940s, Mrkusich faced widespread antagonism towards abstraction and relied on his work for the innovative design firm Brenner Associates in order to make a living. But by the early 1970s, he had established himself at the forefront of modernist developments in New Zealand art, held in high esteem by critics and artists for his resonant, mesmerising fields of colour. This sumptuously produced book traces Mrkusich’s career over 60 years, from the early gouaches on paper, through the acclaimed Emblems and Corner series, to recent work where he approaches colour as an open field of discovery.

ISBN 978 1 86940 437 6, 290 x 270mm, hardback, 240 pages, colour illustrations, $99.99.

Fast Talking PI is a first ‘singular, confident and musical’ collection of poetry by Auckland writer and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh. ‘Tusitala’ means writer of tales, and Marsh here lives up to her name with stories of her life, her family and her community, her ancestry, her influences and her history. Using lush imagery and clear rhythms and repetitions to power it forward, Fast Talking PI is structured in three sections, ‘Tusitala’ (personal), ‘Talkback’ (political and historical) and ‘Fast Talking PI’ (already a classic). In poems such as ‘Guys Like Gauguin’ she writes as a ‘calabash breaker’, fighting back against historic injustices, but other poems explore the idea of the calabash as the honoured vessel for identity and story. A generous work that will thrill readers and a tremendous first book.

ISBN 978 1 86940 432 1, 230 x 165mm, paperback, 80 pages, $27.99. INCLUDES CD.

‘David Lange once said New Zealand’s destiny was to be a theme park (and Australia’s, a quarry). We can surely think and act beyond that. Indeed New Zealand is such an interesting place to live precisely because we are so capable of determining our future.’ - Paul Callaghan
Scientist and commentator Paul Callaghan has been fascinated recently with the subject of sustainable wealth generation and culture change. He argues that if New Zealand keeps relying on tourism and farming it will quickly fall to the bottom of the OECD rankings and proposes New Zealand’s future lies in emerging industries based on science, technology, and intellectual property exemplified by companies like Weta Workshop, Fisher and Paykel Healthcare and Tait Electronics. Through interviews with innovators involved in wealth generation through science-based business, in economic thinking and leadership, in investment and in education and philanthropy, Wool to Weta seeks solutions to key issues - Where does New Zealand’s competitive advantage lie? What should be made of the key roles of tourism and farming in the economy? Is new business development likely to come out of those sectors or from outside them? What role should government play in science and economic development? How does the culture of New Zealanders align with their country’s possible economic futures?

ISBN 978 1 86940 438 3, 210 x 138 mm, paperback, 176 pages, $29.99.

Poetry, Michael Harlow writes, is when words sing. In The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap, his remarkable new collection, words do sing; they also shout and whisper, riddle and recur, express and evade. The book begins with a springtime shout of green, it ends with an invisible reader, and along the way wanders ‘all about the world’. And at the centre is a tram conductor, ‘inside a story that dreams / him’.
Harlow’s poems ask what it means, in the face of absurd and shadowy things thrown up by life, to risk delight: what is it ‘that love dares the self to do’? Fans of Harlow’s previous, accomplished collection, Cassandra’s Daughter, will be thrilled to find this poet in assured voice: building up ‘one word one word and then / another, waiting for the light to come / stealing in’.

ISBN 978 1 86940 430 7, 215 x 160mm, paperback, 64 pages, $24.99.

WINNER, 2009 MONTANA NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARD FOR REFERENCE AND ANTHOLOGY

C. K. Stead is New Zealand’s most distinguished living poet. Since publishing his first poems in periodicals like Landfall in the early 1950s, he has experimented with many forms and modes - from open form, free verse, journal composition, quotation and found text to personal lyric, translation and imitation - while always bringing a strong personality, deft craftsmanship and a background of realism to bear on his poetry. This Collected Poems includes the work of his fourteen volumes of poetry, from his first collection, Whether the Will is Free, to The Black River of 2007. In addition, it reprints 22 early previously uncollected poems that date from 1951 to 1961. Annotated by the author, the Collected Poems illustrates more than fifty years of the range and ambition of Stead’s verse, in which the world always looks ‘hard / at the word and the / word at the world’.

ISBN 978 1 86940 418 5, 240 x 170mm, hardback, 560 pages, $59.99.

WINNER, TE REO MAORI CATEGORY, 2009 NGA KUPU ORA BOOK AWARDS

This book is a collection of almost 200 proverbs and sayings from the Taitokerau region - stretching from Auckland to Cape Rēinga. Pepeha and the longer whakataukī are proverbs and sayings passed down by Māori to capture key moments in history, important places and celebrated ancestors. Like the rock that stands in the sea, pepeha are also powerful metaphors for human behaviour. By elucidating people, places and events through the sayings and ssociated traditions, Tāhuhu Kōrero provides new insights into interpreting heritage, cultural values and the contemporary relevance of these oral forms. This book features numerous full-colour images of the people and places referred to in the proverbs, both historical paintings and spectacular new
photographs by Krzysztof Pfeiffer. The combination of proverbs, history, and images results in a rich and accessible introduction to the people and the land of the Taitokerau.

ISBN 978 1 86940 429 1, 240 x 210mm, paperback with flaps, 228 pages, colour illustrations, $44.99

FINALIST, MONTANA NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2009

Even by the versatile standards of Victorian pioneers, Charles Heaphy had an unusually varied career, as a draughtsman, explorer, surveyor, gold agent, geologist, soldier, war hero, politician, land commissioner and judge. Most importantly, however, for decades Heaphy painted and sketched what he saw. From his earliest surviving watercolour of birdlife in the Marlborough Sounds in August 1839 to his last known sketch, drawn on the back of an envelope, showing Maori witnesses at a hearing of the Native Land Court in Palmerston North in December 1879, Charles Heaphy’s art is a remarkable visual diary of life in settler New Zealand. His work has been an inspiration to New Zealand painters from Colin McCahon to Saskia Leek. In this engaging book, richly illustrated with Heaphy’s remarkable paintings and drawings as well as photographs and maps from the period, author Iain Sharp tells the story of Heaphy’s life - from exploring with Thomas Brunner to winning the Victoria Cross in the New Zealand Wars - and his art. Sharp depicts a man capable of being mercenary and self-serving, but also filled with restlessness and a pervasive sense of wonder about the opportunities in New Zealand. .

ISBN 978 1 86940 421 5, 265 x 220mm, hardback, 240 pages, colour plates and ilustrations, $64.99.

Skyscrapers are among the things that make our cities exciting. Intense, awe inspiring, they encapsulate the exhilaration of modern architecture. But they are not alone - from houses, factories, bridges and apartment blocks to chapels, motorways and memorials, New Zealand has numerous examples of stunning modernist design and construction - some under threat and all valuable for New Zealand’s architectural heritage. Long Live the Modern celebrates 180 of these iconic buildings, sites and neighbourhoods, designed by many of New Zealand’s most celebrated architects. In succinct entries, the 46 contributing writers document the structures’ design, construction, context and history, assisted by historic and contemporary photographs and floor plans. Auckland’s Civic Theatre, Parnell Baths, Harbour Bridge and Tamaki state houses appear, alongside Wellington’s Overseas Passenger Terminal, Freyberg Pool, Athfield House and the Beehive. Other buildings include Ernst Plishke’s Church of St Mary in Taihape, Warren and Mahoney’s Dorset St Flats in Christchurch, Cedric Firth’s Monro Building in Nelson, John Scott’s Maori Battalion Memorial Hall in Palmerston North and the H. B. Williams Memorial Library in Gisborne. They show how international ideas were both pursued and adapted to New Zealand concerns, climates and conditions to create a unique local modernism.

ISBN 978 1 86940 415 4, 210 x 265mm, hardback, 256 pages, b+w photographs, $64.99

FINALIST, MONTANA NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2009

Sonja Yelich’s new collection, get some, is a daring departure from the award-winning Clung. It follows an American marine, Edgar, serving in Iraq, and the responses of his family back home to his tour of ‘doody’. Yelich vividly contrasts his life with his family’s, and serves up a whirlwind of perspectives on the war and contemporary American life from The Sopranos to Black Hawk Down, YouTube to SUVs. The narrative of Edgar and his family begins to fragment through the book as the horror of war deepens - a marine loses a leg and a plane ‘breaks its nose on / Poor visibility in summer’. Yelich, highlighting the confusion of war, leaves a reader guessing as to Edgar’s eventual fate. Chilling, funny, deeply sad and immensely thought-provoking, get some is the work of a writer pushing the capacities of language to express the potential of violence to erupt in everyday life.

ISBN 978 1 86940 423 9, 230 x 165mm, paperback, 64 pages, $24.99.

The first important study of sculpture in New Zealand - well received by art lovers and educational institutions alike on its publication in 2002 - is now back in print in an updated edition. For the new edition, Dunn has added a chapter, ‘Crisis of Identity: Sculpture since 2000’, in which he discusses New Zealand sculpture’s international reach, its role at Venice Biennales and the importance of overseas-based New Zealand sculptors such as Francis Upritchard and Ronnie van Hout. Dunn also sees a new popularity for sculpture with the establishment of several outdoor sculpture walks. The book now charts the growth of sculpture from the era of British imports and influence to the more confident art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes a general bibliography and reading lists for each major artist and fourteen new colour plates have been added to the original 76 black and white figures and 92 colour plates.

ISBN 978 1 86940 425 3, 265 x 270mm, hardback, colour and b+w illustrations, 204 pages, $99.99.

Peter Peryer is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary photographers. As Peter Simpson writes, ‘Peryer has over the past three decades and more constructed a world - call it Peryerland - which has its own distinctive topography, climate and features. Only the best photographers are capable of such a feat’. Peter Peryer: Photographer includes an autobiographical essay by Peryer himself, along with eighty photographs personally selected by the photographer. Interested in doubles, pattern and repetition, problems of scale, the surreal and the grotesque, Peryer’s work most often focuses on the ‘thingness’ of his subjects and objects. Here are whitebait, shells, two goats, a Meccano bus, a ‘sand shark’, planes and a windsock, as well as a Moeraki boulder, the trig on Rangitoto and the Alexandra clock. Rich in lovingly examined bits and pieces, and prompting a viewer always to think harder about their significance, this book is a quirky and intimate guide to Peryerland.

ISBN 978 1 86940 417 8, 260 x 240mm, paperback with flaps, 144 pages, colour plates and ilustrations, $59.99

Special limited edtion hardback, signed and hand-numbered, ISBN 978 1 86940 427 7, $119.99.

FINALIST, MONTANA NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS 2009

‘First catch your Weka’, the explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage and onion and roast it on a stick. In that simple way began a great tradition of New Zealand cooking, from Heaphy to the Edmonds Cookery Book, Alison Holst, Hudson and Halls, and the meal on your plate today. In this book, David Veart tells the story of what New Zealanders cooked through the recipes we used. Analysing the crusty deposits and grubby thumb prints on a century and a half of cook books, Veart chronicles the extraordinary foods that we have loved: from boiled calf’s head to the Bill Rowling cake, Irish famine soup to tinned kidneys with mushrooms. First Catch your Weka illuminates the basic elements that make New Zealand cooking distinctive and reveals how our cuisine and our culture have changed. Throughout that history, Veart finds a people who frequently first liked to catch their weka - building a meal out of oysters taken from the rocks, vegetables from the garden and a lamb from the neighbouring farm. By telling the history of what we ate, First Catch your Weka tells us a great deal about who we have been.

ISBN 978 1 86940 410 9, 250 x, paperback with flaps, 336 pages, colour illustrations, $49.99

What does ‘the bush’ mean to Pakeha New Zealanders? Is it a particular type of vegetation, a place to tramp, something to save, or a refuge from civilisation? Going Bush: New Zealanders and Nature in the Twentieth Century is an energetic exploration of these ideas - a cultural reconnaissance of the great outdoors. It blazes a trail through nature, past school gardeners and prize-winning carrots; trampers, ‘blinkin’ tourists’ and deer cullers; memorial plantings and national parks; caravanners and Young Farmers’ Club members; litterbugs and vandals. By exploring the meanings that Pakeha found in nature from the 1890s to the 1970s, Kirstie Ross shows that the bush was as much about conservative values as about conservation. Going Bush presents a fascinating account of New Zealand culture and society in the twentieth century that is powerfully relevant to debates over our relationship with the natural world today.

AUP Studies in Cultural and Social History, 5

ISBN 978 1 86940 424 6, 205 x 210mm, paperback, 200 pages, b+w illustrations, $34.99.

The poets in AUP New Poets 3 all have vastly different yet complementary styles. Janis Freegard writes quirky and often surreal poems about a Wellington inhabited with strange animals, art and people; the humorous prose poem is a favourite vehicle but there are also serious, luminous moments in her selection, ‘The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider and Other Tales’. Reihana Robinson’s poems are tropical but gritty, set as many of them are on Pitcairn Island - ‘A Hum for Pitkern’ is the strong centrepiece of this selection - and elsewhere in the Pacific. Finally, Katherine Liddy is a promising poet who has an unusual interest in, and an ear for, rhyme and rhythm. Her selection is ordered chronologically from the Bronze Age to the space age. Taken together, these poets offer three fresh and assured new voices.

ISBN 978 1 86940 416 1, 235 x 143mm, paperback, 80 pages, $24.99

A companion volume to the author’s Painted Histories and now published in paperback for the first time, this book is the classic account of one of the most influential traditions of Maori wood carving in New Zealand. Carved Histories recounts the history of Ngati Tarawhai carving from pre-European times to the present day and analyses the personalities, families, and social changes that shaped the work. The book includes biographies of key carvers and a list of all known Ngati Tarawhai carvings.

‘Carved Histories is a book I recommend to anyone interested in Maori, Pacific or indigenous art; to anyone intrigued or excited by art theory; to anyone who has ever admired the rampant beauty of Te Puawai o Te Arawa, or considered the edged intricacies of a carved walking staff. To anyone who wonders about being Maori, being pakeha, being kiwi - being here; this is another perspective for you, and it is a significant one.’ - Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Art New Zealand

ISBN 978 1 86940 426 0, 260 x 185mm, paperback with flaps, 450 pages, maps, genealogies, colour and b+w illus, $59.99