Authors: Gregory O'Brien
ISBN-13: 9780864734181, ISBN-10: 0864734182
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Date Published: September 2002
Edition: (Non-applicable)
After Bathing at Baxter's is a personal exploration of-and homage to-some of the important New Zealand poets and painters of the 20th century, beginning-as the title suggests-with James K. Baxter. This collection is filled with anecdotes and personal observation. Alongside Baxter, the book includes major pieces on writers Kendrick Smithyman, Janet Frame, and Ruth Dallas. Following a sequence of autobiographical stories, O'Brien shifts his gaze to the visual arts, taking the reader on a tour of Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Rosalie Gascoigne, and Denis O'Connor.
Author Biography: Gregory O'Brien has exhibited paintings, illustrated books, and published numerous collections of poetry, nonfiction, and a novel. As well as coediting three anthologies of New Zealand poetry, O'Brien has coedited (with Te Miringa Hohaia and Lara Strongman) Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, which was cowinner of the Biography and History Prize, Montana New Zealand Book Awards, 2001. He lives in New Zealand and works as a curator at City Gallery Wellington; runs a poetry workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington; and appears regularly on New Zealand's National Radio.
Black square dance: an introduction | 7 | |
Acknowledgements | 14 | |
I | An Alphabet Without Edges | |
After bathing at Baxter's | 17 | |
Southern Woman - Ruth Dallas | 46 | |
An alphabet without edges - from a Janet Frame notebook | 53 | |
Imagine the imagination - Margaret Mahy's Dissolving Ghost | 62 | |
A journey around Kendrick Smithyman's Atua Wera | 66 | |
High cultural life - Eric McCormick's An Absurd Ambition | 81 | |
Widening horizons and worlds regained: a conversation | 84 | |
II | The Shape of Living | |
Morning Glory in Springtime in autumn - self-portrait | 101 | |
An attempt at the first page of an autobiography | 103 | |
The shape of living children I | 105 | |
Lost and living children | 109 | |
Aspects of his face | 111 | |
East born | 114 | |
Wild horses | 120 | |
The exact size of the world | 123 | |
The dark plane leaves at evening | 126 | |
North Piha bach with typewriter | 145 | |
The second Ada | 148 | |
Radio Birdman | 152 | |
A long sentence in Czech ending in English | 158 | |
The shape of living children II | 159 | |
The man who wrote the book about the weather | 163 | |
Electricities | 166 | |
III | Fringe Dwellers | |
Blue Monk, Black Light - Ralph Hotere and Thelonious Monk, a notebook | 179 | |
No road to follow - Eric Lee-Johnson | 195 | |
These May Mornings in October - Rosalie Gascogne | 199 | |
Big tree transmission - Colin McCahon's tau cross | 202 | |
Breaking open the luggage - Denis O'Connor's 'concrete poetry' | 209 | |
First on the left past the art supermarket, the magic theatre - Martin Edmond's The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont | 213 | |
I am a shepherd | 217 | |
Chunk of landscape, chunk of memory - the paintings of Euan Macleod | 218 | |
Changing the light - Noel McKenna in Taranaki | 225 | |
The outsider within | 229 | |
Somebody say something - Colin McCahon's Storm Warning | 239 | |
The public interest - an annotated bibliography | 260 | |
Index | 283 |