Lawrence JonesThe Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature, edited by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams (AUP 2012), 1180 pp., $75
Sam Elworthy of AUP has said that he had hoped to be able to ‘put down the light weight publishing of Random-Penguin-House’ with this anthology, but when Graham Beattie pointed out that Random House’s Big House, Small House: New Houses by New Zealand Architects weighed in at 2.85 kg, he conceded that in terms of weight, at least, the AUP anthology was not the biggest New Zealand book of 2012, although he still claimed that it had the most pages. But the real controversy concerning the anthology has been not its bulk but its omissions and exclusions (and to a lesser extent its inclusions). In print and radio reviews, interviews and on literary blogs and even on Twitter, who’s in and who’s out has been a hot topic. Other significant (and often related) topics include the inadequate selection of drama, the relative lack of recent non-fiction, the use of brief extracts from a number of novels rather than longer extracts from fewer texts, the undue weighting in the later sections to writers published by VUP and AUP, the relative lack of representation of South Island writers and the grouping of texts in the sub-sections by theme rather than by author.
Before facing that vexed question of who’s in and who’s out it would be useful to look at some of the preliminary publishing and editorial decisions made by Elworthy and the editors. First there are the choices made by the publisher who commissioned the work. There was the choice of what audience the book would be aimed at. Some reviewers, such as Hugh Roberts in the Listener, assumed that the AUP anthology, like the American Norton anthologies, was aimed at university literature students. Roberts was probably right about teachers and students being the ‘primary users’, but Elworthy told Andrew Stone of the New Zealand Herald that he hoped that, like the Australian Macquarie PEN Anthology, the book might be a ‘best-seller’, finding an ‘eager market’ among general readers. Significantly, Peter Pierce, reviewing the anthology in The Australian, thought that it should become ‘for many reading households in Australia … a vital and much used possession’, a reference book for the family library. In the United States the academic text market is so huge that a literary anthology can be aimed exclusively at it; 2,500,000 Copies of the Norton Anthology of American Literature have been sold since the introduction of the first edition in 1979.
In a middle-sized market such as Australia or a small one such as New Zealand, a national literary anthology probably must be aimed at a wider market than just university students. This choice of a broader audience focus means that the AUP volume does not have all of the educational features of The Norton Anthology of American Literature: maps and timelines; full period introductions, and separate biographical-critical introductions and annotated primary and secondary bibliographies for each author; an author-title index; textual and explanatory footnotes for each text; selected critical excerpts on some key texts; online study guides and quizzes; a 300-page guide for instructors. The AUP volume has only an unobtrusive, non-textbookish minimum: brief introductions to each chronological section; no textual footnotes; brief, non-evaluative biographical outlines and a primary bibliography for each author; an excellent author, title and selective topic index.
Another crucial publisher’s decision was for a one-volume printed book of about 1200 pages. When Guy Somerset commented on the size and weight of the book in an interview with the editors, Mark Williams replied that he and Jane Stafford would have welcomed a bigger one. They had submitted enough edited copy for a 1500-page volume, but it was condensed down to the present 1180-page length. Even with 1500 pages there would not have been space to include some complete major novels and plays in addition to long extracts such as was allowed to the editors of the Norton American literature anthology by its two-volume, 5500 page format (the first volume even has the complete text of Thoreau’s Walden). Thus Williams and Stafford had to use extracts from novels and plays and opted mostly for short thematic ones.
Another important early decision was to select only texts in English, with no translations from the Maori (except for two letters from the 1860s which are presented in their original newspaper translations) because, as the editors clearly state in the introduction, ‘this is an anthology grounded in and defined by the English language, its registers and conventions’. In that regard, it is consistent with the choice made for the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English in 1991 and the OUP An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English in 1997. Unstated but equally definite is that the anthology was to be chronological and historical, presenting, as the blurb says, ‘Aotearoa’s major writing, from early exploration and encounter to a globalised, multicultural present’. Elworthy told Somerset that he was concerned that the view of New Zealand literary history underlying the anthology should not be cultural nationalism’s ‘old story repeated’ and that he was drawn to Stafford and Williams as editors partly because of their groundbreaking reassessment of New Zealand’s earlier literature in Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914. In their introduction Stafford and Williams are quite explicit about their historical view: ‘This anthology demonstrates that much happened before, during and after the cultural nationalist movement that needs to be seen on its own terms, without the withering disapproval of Curnow’s anthology introductions or Glover’s satire’.
Stafford and Wiliams’ attempt to offset ‘the critical eclipse of the colonial period’ has been praised by a number of reviewers, but their attempt to offset ‘the way women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century, notably Robin Hyde, were sidelined by the masculine and high-culture perspective of cultural nationalism’ and their emphasis on the ‘domestic’ poetry and fiction by women that has followed have received less attention, perhaps because the process of bringing forward those women writers has been ongoing since the days of Wendy Harrex’s work with the New Women’s Press, and by scholars such as Michelle Leggott, Heather Murray, Heather Roberts, Lydia Wevers and Mary Edmond-Paul, among others. Stafford and Williams’ relatively generous representation of the work of Blanche Baughan, Hyde, Jean Devanny, Mary Stanley, J.C. Sturm and Jenny Bornholdt has served to balance the scales, although one might have wished for more from Jane Mander and Eileen Duggan.
While Stafford and Williams are critical of the biases in the cultural nationalist attitude to New Zealand literary history, they do not go the opposite extreme found in some radical feminist and Marxist-flavoured postcolonial discussions and simply reject the cultural nationalist writings. Their selections from the work of Curnow, Glover, Sargeson, Brasch and Fairburn are relatively generous, and even Glover’s ‘The Arraignment of Paris’, which they consider to be a ‘patronising dismissal’ of women’s writing, is included in its entirety as the most important satire of its time, and those classic masculinist lyric sequences, ‘Sings Harry’ and ‘Arawata Bill’, are likewise included as wholes. Stafford and Williams insist that ‘the tradition of those singing men of the mid-twentieth century has not disappeared or diminished because other ways of writing have established counter-claims to our attention’. They have also ‘resisted the narrative in which Kiwis as tolerant and open postcolonial citizens look back in horror at their recent sexist and racist past’. Their historical approach to New Zealand literature at least down to the 1970s seems expressed in the balance in their selections, an expression of the ‘open attention’ they urge upon their readers rather than dogmatic judgement on and condescension towards earlier texts.
The most important preliminary editorial decision was perhaps that made by Stafford and Williams on an organisational plan for the book. They divided it into eleven major sections based on chronological periods, varying (after the short first one) from 60 to 135 pages, each with a thematically suggestive name: ‘Contact’ (1769-1839), ‘Colonial’ (1840-71), ‘Maoriland’ (1872-1914); ‘Between the Wars’ (1915-40); ‘Cultural Nationalism’ (1932-45); ‘Fretful Sleepers: After the War’ (1945-59); ‘From Kiwi Culture to Counter-culture’ (1960-69); ‘Earthly: The Seventies’ (1970-79); ‘Whaddarya: The Eighties’ (1980-89); ‘Cabin Fever: The Nineties’ (1990-99); ‘How to Live Elsewhere’ (2000-11). Each of these sections is divided into thematic sub-sections, each of which contains from two to eleven texts focused on a theme suggested by its title, such as ‘A Dying Race?‘ or ‘Distance Looks Our Way’.
This is a very different arrangement from, say, that of the Norton American anthology, which is divided into six much broader period sections, and which groups the texts within each by author, with the authors arranged chronologically according to date of birth and with the texts by each author grouped together and arranged chronologically. If on the one hand their plan made for more ‘conversation’ between texts from the same period dealing with the same theme, it also discouraged the building of a sense of an individual author’s development and interests. For example, the seven selections from the work of Robin Hyde are dispersed through five different sub-sections in the ‘Between the Wars’ period section and one-sub-section of the overlapping ‘Cultural Nationalism’ period section – 20 pages of Hyde texts sprinkled through 107 pages of the book.
These preliminary decisions had important effects on the aspects of the book that reviewers criticised. The voluntary absences (through refusal to permit the publication of the texts selected by the editors) of Vincent O’Sullivan, Alan Duff and Janet Frame (represented by the Janet Frame Literary Trust), which were regretted by all the reviewers and received a special emphasis in Somerset’s interview-article in the Listener, were in the cases of Frame and O’Sullivan directly related to editorial decisions. The Frame discussion was reportedly long and complex, but a central factor seems to have been the Trust’s refusal to give permission for the use of extracts from the novels, as the trustees perhaps remembered how unhappy Frame had been with the use of such extracts — grouped under broad thematic headings — in Carole Ferrier’s The Janet Frame Reader in 1995.
O’Sullivan complained to Somerset about the ‘narrow and prescriptive’ tone of the anthology, probably referring to the headings of the thematic sub-sections, and said he did not want his work so treated. Roberts in his later Listener review found the grouping of texts and writers into the eleven chronological sections ‘not unreasonable’, but the sub-sections with the works grouped ‘not by author or chronology, but by theme’ he found ‘irritatingly programmatic … as if Stafford and Williams are trying to impose their own course syllabus on everyone else’. Williams, on the other hand, told Somerset that the arrangement of the texts in thematic groups was ‘much more flexible‘ than the Norton-type arrangement by author and chronology and ‘actually conveys the way people read the work’, and he called the arrangement ‘a machine that generates conversations’.
We might ask, however, if the thematic grouping might not also generate the textual selections. Maurice Gee, for example, as a major writer of fiction is represented by a short story, ‘A Glorious Morning, Comrade’, a very brief but powerful excerpt from Plumb, and a very good six-page excerpt from his rather flawed first novel, The Big Season. The longer excerpt works perfectly with the Peter Cape song that precedes it in the ‘Vernaculars’ sub-section of the ‘From Kiwi Culture to Counter-culture‘ period section, but is it right to represent our finest realist novelist with an excerpt from an early work depicting 1950s small-town life and to select nothing from the post-Plumb novels such as Crime Story which critically depict the new New Zealand that Rogernomics made? As it is, the whole of Gee’s post-Plumb career, lasting from 1979 to 2009 and containing most of his major novels, is not represented. Thus the most significant novelist of Stafford and Williams‘ last three periods is not represented in their selections from those decades.
It is one thing to regret the voluntary absences and to question the representativeness of some of the texts selected, but it is something else to criticise the editorial omissions, as many reviewers have done. In reviews and articles with headlines like ‘Gaps in the Story’ or ‘The Missing List’, Stone in the Herald (also quoting Tony Simpson, Peter Bland, James McNeish and Philip Temple on the matter), Somerset, Kevin IreIand on the New Zealand Studies Network blog, Paula Green in Metro, Nicholas Reid on his ‘Reid’s Reader’ Blog and Stephen Stratford on his ‘Quote Unquote’ blog all presented lists of writers not selected but who they thought ought to have been there. The lists varied from Somerset’s one (Charlotte Grimshaw, accompanied with a picture next those of Frame, O’Sullivan and Duff) to Green’s statement that there were ‘more than 70 writers’ who should have been included. The growing list of omitted writers obviously could not have been accommodated within an anthology of 1180 pages unless there had been the extensive cuts in the existing selections: possibly cutting out the more ‘documentary’ background texts, limiting entries to one per writer perhaps, maybe excluding some writers now included. The result would probably have been more widely ‘representative’, but would also probably have been of lower literary and historical quality.
Roberts tried to meet the issue head-on, as was implied by the title of his review: What, no kitchen sink? Wittily comparing the editors’ position to that of dinner party hosts receiving ‘angry phone calls from the friends you didn’t invite’, he concluded that ‘the “who’s invited” controversy is not a very fruitful one’, for ‘any of us, given a chance to to put this anthology together, would do things differently’. In this predominantly positive review, he had also included within his dinner party simile the voluntary absences of Frame, O’Sullivan and Duff, making light of them as implicitly temperamental decisions: ‘Some of the more notable no-shows declined invitations. The estate of Janet Frame couldn’t agree with the editors about which clothes she’d wear to the party, and Vincent O’Sullivan and Alan Duff were washing their hair that night’. Elworthy, who as publisher had been involved in the unsuccessful negotiations regarding the missing trio, was obviously concerned at their absence, but in relation to editorial omissions his defense of them to Stone was similar to Roberts’ view: the book ‘is just one rather interesting, illuminating path through New Zealand writing. There are other paths and people should take them.’
The issue of omissions, however, should not just be shrugged off as inevitable. We should at least be aware that, as Roberts points out, in the New Zealand publishing situation, ‘if you didn’t make it into this massive tome, chances are you might never see yourself collected into a competing volume’, and thus, as one excluded writer complained to me, many readers, especially students, might never be introduced to your work. If this is inevitable, it is also regrettable. The editors say in their introduction: ‘Our purpose is not to present a canonical view of New Zealand literature’, but inclusion in the only comprehensive historical anthology in New Zealand will be taken by many readers as a kind of ‘canonisation’, even if that is not the editors’ purpose. As the blurb on the back of the dust cover rather boastfully concludes: for years to come this anthology will be our guide to what’s worth reading – and why. To be excluded is to be left out of the only game in town.
The patterns that can be discerned in the long list of omissions pointed out by reviewers raise further issues. Most obvious is the chronological pattern: the great majority of the writers named have been publishing in the last 30 years, with only a minority such as George Chamier, Ngaio Marsh or Roderick Finlayson dating from earlier periods. A couple of factors are probably involved: the more recent writers have received more attention and had more readers in recent years (when did you last, if ever, read a novel by James Courage?); and, even if the idea of a canon is unfashionable, there tends to be a consensus core of an historical canon for the earlier periods that is not there for the present and near past. For the writing since 1990 especially, as Stratford said, ‘Picking so many current writers is a hostage to fortune’, for ‘it is too soon to tell who will last’. But there is also a generic pattern to the list of omissions; by far the largest group of omissions is of writers of fiction, followed by a group of non-fiction writers half as large and by a group of poets of a similar size, with almost no mention of dramatists. The primacy of fiction writers among the ‘missing list’ is predictable, for it is probably still the most widely read genre by general literary readers, although there can be no doubt that non-fiction texts have many more readers among the reading public at large, and even among the literarily inclined literary non-fiction may have moved into first place.
Other factors are involved in the non-fiction list: first, there is the difficulty of deciding what is ‘literary’ non-fiction — does that category include some biography, autobiography, history, social criticism, literary criticism and travel writing as well as ‘creative non-fiction’? The recurrence of names like Michael King, Judith Binney, Anne Salmond, Dick Scott, Tony Simpson, Martin Edmond, and Philip Temple and James McNeish (both also novelists) illustrates the difficulty of a defining line; it also shows an historical bias to the anthology selections, for only four of the 38 non-fiction selections in the book come from the last four sections, covering 1970 to 2011, certainly the richest time for New Zealand non-fiction and the time when these omitted writers have been active.
It would seem that non-fiction extracts were used much more when there was little poetry and fiction from which to choose, but were sacrificed to poetry and fiction since 1970. The four recent texts chosen by Stafford and Williams – extracts from Witi Ihimaera’s ‘Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception’ and Geoff Park’s Nga Uruora – The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape, Peter Wells’ essay ‘When My Brother Got Thin’, and sections from Harry Ricketts’ long essay, How to Live Elsewhere – are fine examples of prose with a literary, experiential quality and they fit well with the poems and prose fiction pieces in their various thematic sub-sections; however, in no way are they representative of the rich range of literary non-fiction published in the last forty years, such as (to name only a few) the autobiographies of Frame (excerpts from which they planned to include but were not allowed to) and Sargeson, Toss Woollaston’s Sage Tea, Martin Edmond’s Autobiography of My Father, McNeish’s Dance of the Peacocks, Lynley Hood’s Sylvia!, or, in that borderland between literary and non-literary non-fiction, Michael King’s biographies of Frame and Sargeson, or Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields. Of course length restrictions ruled out anything like a full selection, but maybe there could have been a few more indicative examples and a franker discussion in the introduction of how the non-fiction selections are by necessity not as full as those of prose fiction and poetry.
Then there is (or there isn’t) drama: 5 extracts totaling 20 pages to represent New Zealand drama – excerpts from Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather, Maurice Shadbolt’s Once on Chunuk Bair, Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament, Briar Grace-Smith’s Nga Pou Wahine and Jacob Rajan’s Krishnan’s Dairy). Most of the reviewers did not comment on the absence of dramatists who have had full careers and publication, such as Roger Hall, Robert Lord, Renee, or Mervyn Thompson, much less the more occasional dramatists such as Michelanne Forster or John Broughton, or the writers in other genres who also wrote plays such as Sargeson, Allen Curnow, Fiona Farrell or James K. Baxter. However, Murray Edmond was outspoken in replying to Reid’s review, complaining that ‘The elephant in the room’ in the anthology on which Reid had not commented was the thin representation of New Zealand drama, leaving ‘a glaring mountain of omissions of the work of playwrights’, a situation that seemed to mean either ‘straightforward ignorance and lack of reading on the editors’ part’ or ‘something more dismissive’. Further, he held that the anthology gave almost no evidence of the significant history of ‘the growth of dramatic writing in Aotearoa over the last thirty years’, leaving a large hole in the literary history. Drama was the last of the genres to develop in New Zealand, but the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature still grants it 73 pages, as against 75 for the short story. That balance is not achieved here. The dramatic extracts that are there, as with the non-fiction extracts, are good and fit well into their thematic sub-sections (‘Foreskin’s Lament’ from the play of that title even provides the overall title for the 1980s section), but taken together they are utterly inadequate to allow readers to piece together from them anything like the story of drama in New Zealand.
The striking feature of the list of poets most often mentioned as omitted — Peter Bland, Bill Sewell, Alistair Paterson, Richard Reeve, David Howard and Mark Pirie — is that only Reeve has been published by AUP or VUP, while of the 39 poets represented in the last two sections, 20 have been published by VUP, 12 by AUP. Favouritism is probably not an issue, but perhaps the greater attention paid to the more visible and near at hand is. In an interview with Tim Jones in the online periodical Cordite Poetry Review, Howard made this point, appropriately using several effective metaphors:
‘When there’s a lot of noise from one direction then heads turn naturally that way.
Scholars of contemporary poetry look to Wellington with good reason. The obligation
is not on the IIML/VUP/Sport nexus to quieten down, but on scholars to explore
elsewhere before drawing conclusions. Too often when they turn their backs on the
capital it’s to use a Claude glass.’
On the other hand, to demonstrate how difficult would be the selection of poets from the last 50 years, here is a list of New Zealand poets writing in English active in at least part of the last fifty years not included as poets in the AUP anthology but who were selected in one or more of eight anthologies completely or partially dedicated to contemporary New Zealand poetry from Alistair Paterson’s 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets in 1980 to Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack’s Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets in 2009 (the number in parentheses after the poet’s name indicates in how many of the eight anthologies he or she was included)[1]: Rob Allan (2), Rosemary Allpress (1), K.O. Arvidson (2), Eric Beach (1), Tony Beyer (4), Peter Bland (3), Meg Campbell (2), Gordon Challis (2), John Dickson (3), Basil Dowling (1), Kim Eggleston (2), Riemke Ensing (4), Janet Frame (2), Ruth Gilbert (1), Paul Henderson (Ruth France) (2), Stephen Higginson (1), Keri Hulme (3), Rob Jackaman (1), Michael Jackson (4), Mike Johnson (2), Vivienne Joseph (1), Hugh Lauder (3), Graham Lindsay (3), Alan Loney (2). Iain Lonie (1), Heather McPherson (2), Elizaeth Nannestad (3), Peter Olds (1), W. H. Oliver (2), Bob Orr (2), Vincent O’Sullivan (6), Alistair Paterson (2), Joanna Paul (2), Gloria Rawlinson (2), Alan Riach (1), Nigel Roberts (1), Richard von Sturmer (1), Virginia Were (1), Helen Watson White (1). The anthologies differ greatly in the times they try to cover and in comprehensiveness.
Some, like those of Paterson and Edmond-Paul, were aiming at calling attention to new developments in or alternative schools of poetry. Others focused on a limited time span, such as the 1972-86 coverage in the Caxton anthology, or the 1986-2009 coverage in the Johnston-Marsack one. Only a few poets, such as Smithyman or Curnow, wrote across the full ‘contemporary’ time-span the anthologies cover (and Curnow appears in seven of them, Smithyman in six), while the poets who began in the late 90s or afterwards, could conceivably be in only the Johnston-Marsack one. But all of the poets in the above list were believed by at least one anthologist of the last thirty years to be worthy of special notice. There are almost forty names there, much too many to be all included in the AUP anthology, but I suspect that if readers interested in New Zealand poetry were asked to nominate which ones ought to have been in the AUP anthology we would have extremely different lists, and if we were also asked to nominate poets who had appeared in none of the eight anthologies but were worthy of representation in the AUP one the matter would be complicated further. Inclusions and exclusions are extremely important, not to be taken lightly, but that does not mean that agreement on the matter is at all possible, especially for recent writing, and the New Zealand poetry of the past fifty years illustrates this point all too clearly.
Of the list of 25 writers of fiction about whose omission reviewers have complained, 15 have appeared on the scene in the last 25 years, a time in which the number of books of fiction by New Zealanders has expanded tremendously. In 1955, four New Zealand books that might be considered ‘literary fiction’ were published; fifty years later 30 books of fiction were nominated for the the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, nine of them first books. This relative deluge of fiction in recent years has made the job of anthology editors much more difficult when they have to pick texts to represent recent times, leaving much more opportunity for disagreement. However, the argument seems to be less fierce (and geographical) than that concerning the omission of poets, with only the omission of Grimshaw given much emphasis among recent writers, and that of Finlayson among writers from earlier periods. From the 32 short story writers and 38 novelists represented in the anthology (a few writers such as Gee and Patricia Grace are on both lists), one could piece together a reasonably full story of the development of fiction in New Zealand, although there would be a huge hole where Janet Fame should be and sizable holes where O’Sullivan and Duff should be (and O’Sullivan‘s absence would also be felt in the stories of poetry and drama and poetry, while Frame’s would be felt in the stories of poetry and non-fiction).
In some ways the AUP anthology could be discussed as many rugby matches are, as a game of two halves. In the first ‘half’, the 600 pages of texts covering from 1769 to 1969, there is the sense of a balanced and at the same time imaginative choice and arrangement of texts that gives a clear sense of the shape of New Zealand literary history while at the same time opening up a fresh sense of relationships by the juxtaposition of texts. In the second ‘half’, the 450 pages of texts covering 1970 to 2011, there are some brilliant episodes in the juxtaposition of texts but the general sense of the shape and balance of the whole is lost.
The AUP anthology is a welcome addition to the New Zealand literary world, especially in its ‘open attention’ to New Zealand literary history, but like all good things it could be better. The anthologist’s job is not easy, especially as it must be carried out within limits not always chosen. An historical anthology that attempts to bring things right up to the present necessarily faces the further problems of reduced historical distance for the recent material. Almost inevitably such a book involves compromises and some insoluble problems, but that does not mean that it could not be improved. If there is ultimately a second edition, I would hope for a fuller representation of drama and recent non-fiction and a franker discussion of the problems involved in anthologising those genres, for possibly more recent poetry from outside the VUP-AUP orbit, and for renegotiations to get Frame, O’Sullivan and Duff into the book. Of course, developments in electronic technology may in the meantime transform the anthology playing field. Perhaps Stratford was right in saying that in that respect ‘a book like this is a dinosaur. We will not see its like again’. But right now it is a dinosaur worth having.
LAWRENCE JONES is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Otago and a reseacher and writer with a special interest in New Zealand literature. His books include Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture, 1932-1945, published by Victoria University Press.
[1]Alistair Paterson, ed., 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Dunedin: Pilgrims South Press. 1980); Fleur Adcock, ed., The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (Auckland: OUP, 1982); Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, third edition (Auckland: OUP, 1987); Murray Edmond and Mary Paul,eds., The New Poets: Initiatives in New Zealand Poetry Wellington: Allen & Unwin / Port Nicholson Press), 1987); Mark Williams, ed., The Caxton Press Anthology: New Zealand Poetry 1972-1986 (Christchurch: Caxton, 1987), Miriama Evans, Harvey McQueen and Ian Wedde, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry: Nga Kupu Titohu o Aotearoa (Auckland: Penguin, 1989); Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien, Mark Williams, eds., An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Auckland: OUP, 1997); Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack, eds., Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Wellington: VUP, 2009).
Thanks for this excellent review of Poetry Anthology. Rob Allan Careys Bay.