Essays
Oracles and the Intellect: James McAuley in the Centenary of his Birth
”In turning to McAuley’s own poetry for alternatives to what he had so passionately denounced in The End of Modernity, I find myself disappointed. Not that the poetry is bad. His best work is excellent and deserves a central place in the history of our mid twentieth-century poetry. But it is excellent in ways that are unexpected from the author of The End of Modernity, and it was not until later in his career that he found that voice.”
The Te Kūiti Underground
What amazed me was not just that Beck had written back to me. It was that he had written the words ‘New Zealand’. He’d said the secret code word that granted us access to the rest of the world. And he was interested to know what it was like here. It didn’t seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he’d said ‘Wow’.
An Archive Is An Empty Theatre: Elizabeth Hardwick
‘The writing of biography, Hardwick knew, is subject to the same technical questions that govern fiction but with an added ethical dilemma. Namely, that the writer must choose from one of many possible narratives, with the knowledge that this act of selection will fundamentally influence the representation at hand. We encounter the same dilemma in the archive: how to construct, from a lifetime of papers, a singular portrait of the author? It is impossible to include everything.”