Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews

Front Cover
Victoria University Press, 2000 - History - 295 pages
Bill Manhire takes the books and poems he loves out of the pupil and lecture hall and returns them to their readers. In these pages unlikely people rub shoulders - Ralph Hotere and Philip Larkin, Sylivia Plath and James K. Baxter, Maurice Gee and Laura Ranger - Then along the way Manhire investigates why the world's best poems sound like dirty songs, tell outrageous lies, and thrive on their own mistakes. These essays and interviews will not tell you what to think, but they will probably inspire you to do your own thinking.
 

Contents

Impure Sounds in New Zealand Poetry
9
Interviewed by Iain Sharp
23
Note for The Young New Zealand Poets
54
Fault
66
Laura Ranger
95
Mutes Earthquakes
109
Maurice Gees The Big Season
118
Growing Points of Truth
124
Larkin at Sixty
151
Real Hot Air
172
Notes on Private Gardens
190
Baxters Collected Poems
209
As If
227
Snow Job
240
Index
290
Copyright

Symmes Hole
133

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About the author (2000)

Bill Manhire is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, editor, and educator. He was born in Invercargill, New Zealand in 1946. He attended the University of Otago. Manhire is an English professor at Victoria University with research interests in New Zealand literature and the literature of Antarctica. He is also the director of the school's creative writing program and the editor of "Mutes and Earthquakes," a book containing the work of several students. Manhire is New Zealand's Poet Laureate and was the Fullbright Visiting Professor in New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Manhire has been publishing since 1970, producing almost 30 books. He has received the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry three times and the Montana Award.

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