When we came to visit, the two bonded over Jock Hobbs and David Kirk. Although I’m not sure how interested Ichiro really was in the national game. His real heroes weren’t All Blacks but epidemiologists like Daniel Gajdusek and Richard Doll (the man who proved that cigarettes cause lung cancer). Ichiro was the ultimate nerd. He rented an extra room in our flat to store his alphabetically arranged scientific papers, manga and novels. As our rotting five-bedroom bungalow shook to The Cure and Prince, he tacked Bach and Hemingway posters to the walls. After late-night ward rounds at Wellington Hospital, he pored over extramural university papers on statistics, economics and the philosophy of aesthetics. His idea of relaxation was to smoke a pipe and listen to John Coltrane LPs.
Book review: A Clear Dawn, anthology of non-fiction, fiction and poetry covers the diversity of New Zealand
15 May, 2021 12:00 AM
3 minutes to read
Edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong
(Auckland University Press, $50) Taking its title from Ya-Wen Ho s translation of a Li Po poem, A Clear Dawn holds all the promise and possibility of its namesake, suggesting a clear way forward for new voices to be heard and the dawning of greater representation, publication and recognition of a diversity of New Zealand writers.
Naturally the diversity of writers leads to a diversity of content. This is an anthology of creative non-fiction, fiction and poetry with excerpts from novels, previously unpublished works, and published pieces from the last decade. While some writers explore ideas about being Asian, being migrants, being torn between the traditions of family and discovering their true self, others write about being queer, being alone, being young, being old, revenge