Paul Day
The Orange Tree, by Helen Shaw, The Pelorus Press, 1957, 80 pp., 7s. 6d.
Worm in the Apple
The stunning debut of the repairing of a life, by Leigh Davis (Otago University Press, 2010), 216 pp., $39.95
Our stock of available reality not only has been more or less stopped being added to, it is rapidly shrinking, and what remains of it also is becoming costlier. The stunning debut of the repairing of a life by the late Leigh Davis is one of those increasingly rare books that not only dares to but succeeds in augmenting our stuff of life. It is a humbly ambitious work of wide scope and deep integrity. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, the ethical is fundamentally a question of an individual’s attitude when regarding the world-as-it-is, Davis’s book is quietly powerful enough to prompt the reader to question perspectives informing their own normative outlook. And it is in this regard that Davis’s The stunning debut can be considered the finest long poem published by a New Zealander since Smithyman’s Atua Wera.
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The Lightness of Being Bill Culbert
David Eggleton
Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, by Ian Wedde (Auckland University Press, hardback, illustrated, 272 pp., $99.99.
Have lightbulb, will travel. Sculptor Bill Culbert embodies the expatriate artist condition. He left New Zealand in 1957 at the age of 21 to attend the Royal College of Art in London and has lived overseas ever since. However, after he first returned to these islands from Europe in 1978 to take up a short term artist-in-residency at the University of Canterbury, he has been to-ing and fro-ing between northern and southern hemispheres on a regular basis. And, as Ian Wedde tells us in Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, Culbert ‘travels light’ — often, apart from a carry-on bag, his sole piece of luggage is a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase ‘containing fluorescent tubes . . . or hard-to-find fixtures and bulbs.’ It’s a hold-all for odds and ends that might be useful for helping set up an artwork or an installation that involves lighting.
But there’s lighting and there’s lighting. Bill Culbert is a lighting specialist of another order. He uses light in all its manifestations — ‘light-marks in space, light-in-light, light in darkness, night light, daylight’ as a kind of substance, something to sculpt with, something to paint with. As Ian Wedde observes, light enables Culbert to ‘brush’ objects and atmospheres into a state of aesthetic clarity. The way this artist salvages ordinary light playing over ordinary things, and brings it to our attention; and his devotion to light’s radiance, its immanence, seems almost priestly, like that of some old-time Platonist philosopher who sought to show the world is really crystal, a sphere through which light shines.
DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online.
World Turned Upside Down
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00
Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is compulsory. Even little knowledge of New Zealand history is a passport to thrive on Wulf and if you don’t know, here’s a fine way to enter the conversation. Wulf rewards the diligent reader. Dive into the ancient, imagine a time before time, the origin of time, words heavy-laden with ancestors treading deep into the infinite as you read.
Worlds Within
Jamie Hanton
A Micronaut in the Wide World: the Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 182 pp., $59.99.
Imagination, and all its mighty power, is at the centre of both of these recent Gregory O’Brien publications. It is no coincidence that both titles have the eyes and minds of children at their core, yet in both cases O’Brien’s writing elevates imagination beyond its usual youthful collocation. Back and Beyond is written, as the title suggests, for more innocent art readers, while Micronaut is a biography of New Zealand expatriate artist and children’s illustrator Graham Percy.
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