Showing posts with label Stu Bagby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stu Bagby. Show all posts

Saturday, August 05, 2023

Takapuna Library Poetry Reading - Tuesday 22/8/23


Get ready for the Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day in the best possible way. Join MC Stu Bagby, plus long-time poet Piers Davies and co-facilitator of the Titirangi Poets Group, Janet Charman, author of many poetry books, Amy Marguerite who's working on her debut poetry collection, and Jack Ross, author of numerous novels, short fiction and poetry collections. Plus, songs from poet musician Caitlin Smith.

There will be a cash-only book table at the event.

Where: Takapuna Library, Level 1

When: Tuesday 22 August, 6 pm to 7:30 pm

Light refreshments served on arrival

RSVP: TakapunaEvents@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz or via Eventbrite

Gold coin donation appreciated.


NB: For further information about each of the performers, please go to:





Monday, December 04, 2017

Pictures from the Paper Table Booklaunch (3/12/17)



Bronwyn and I would like to thank everyone who came to the Paper Table novella launch yesterday, and were generous enough to buy so many books! We'd also like to thank our two brilliant speakers, Stu Bagby and Tracey Slaughter; our visionary designer Lisa Baudry; Leicester's cousins Dave and Viv Kyle, who were there to represent the Kyle family; our two helpers Niamh and Hatty Fitzgerald, and all the rest of you who were able to spend your Sunday afternoon with us.

We really appreciate it.






































If you have any questions about either the books or the imprint, please visit our Paper Table website.





Brand design: Lisa Baudry


Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Paper Table Novellas Launch - 3/12/17



Brand design & images: Lisa Baudry


I'm pleased to announce the launch of Bronwyn Lloyd's new series of single-volume novellas, in our back garden in Mairangi Bay, on Sunday 3rd December, from 2 pm onwards:







Paper Table Novellas Launch:

When: Sunday 3rd December, 2-4 pm

Where: 6 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay, Auckland

What: Books by Leicester Kyle & Jack Ross

Who: All Welcome! (but please don't forget your wallet)






For a long time now Bronwyn and I have been lamenting the lack of attention paid to the novella form in New Zealand. Now, as the publisher of Paper Table Novellas, she's finally decided to do something about it.




The first of her titles, Letters to a Psychiatrist, is the strange tale of a West Coast spiritual odyssey by distinguished eco-poet Leicester Kyle.

The second, The Annotated Tree Worship, is a story told in two novella-length portions, relating the sordid adventures of a disgraced, self-pitying Academic, caught in the grip of his own psychic crisis:

  1. Letters to a Psychiatrist, by Leicester Kyle


    [$NZ 25]







  2. The Annotated Tree Worship, by Jack Ross



    [$NZ 40 the pair]
    (not available separately]







Stu Bagby (on the right, with his wife Sheila beside him)


Leicester's book will be launched by award-winning poet Stu Bagby. My book will be launched by award-winning fiction writer Tracey Slaughter.



There will also be a range of artworks on sale both by Bronwyn and by Paper Table's brilliant designer, Lisa Baudry.

The wine will flow and a range of culinary treats will be provided. Please do come and spend the afternoon with us.

If you have any further questions about either the books or the imprint, check out our new Paper Table website.





Brand design: Lisa Baudry


Saturday, August 27, 2016

Two Readings: Takapuna & Titirangi



As part of the ongoing celebrations for National Poetry Day, please come and check this out (though it is, admittedly, a few days late):

When: Tuesday 30 August, 6pm - 7.30pm
Where: Takapuna Library, Level 1
Cost: Gold coin/donation

Come and join us as at our annual celebration of poetry with readings from Michael Giacon, Joy MacKenzie, Bronwyn Lloyd, Jack Ross and Stu Bagby as our MC.

Light refreshments will be served from 6pm, with the event starting at 6.30pm.

Booking recommended. Email helen.woodhouse@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz or phone 890 4903.




Photo: Maggie Hall (Wellington, Dec 2014)







And, assuming you don't have anything better to do on the weekend of the Going West Literary Festival (10-11/9/16):

When: Saturday 10 September, 2pm - 3.45pm
Where: Titirangi Library

Featuring JACK ROSS and STU BAGBY

Jack Ross has been the managing editor of Poetry New Zealand since 2014. His publications to date include five poetry collections, three novels and three books of short fiction. He works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany Campus.

Stu Bagby has published both as an anthologist and a poet. His poetry has appeared in several collections and has been included in the Best of the Best New Zealand Poems and Essential New Zealand Poems. He hopes to have a new collection of poems ready for publication later this year.

Followed by a round robin where everyone is invited to read a poem, their own or anyone else's.

MC Piers Davies 5246 927 or piers@wwandd.co.nz for further information.




Photo: Maggie Hall (Wellington, Dec 2014)


Sunday, November 02, 2008

Stu Bagby's Auckland in Poetry Anthology


[Cover image: Richard Killeen, "Man, land, sea and sky" (1967)]


Earlier this year I had the good fortune to receive a copy of Stu Bagby's AUP anthology A Good Handful: Great New Zealand Poems about Sex for review in brief. Here's some of what I had to say there:

[Cover image: Dick Frizzell, "Man and Woman Kissing" (1984)]

I confess that my heart sank when I heard about this project. The title, “A good handful” seemed just a bit too much of an obeisance to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink tendencies of Kiwi backroom culture, and the claim that 69 poems (or was it poets?) were to be included didn’t greatly reassure me either.

And yet – there really are an awful lot of poems about sex, or which touch upon it in some way. Let’s face it, it’s on our minds; and it certainly isn’t only male poets who go on about it.

That in itself doesn’t guarantee a good anthology, of course, but one thing about Stu Bagby is that when he takes up a subject he really thinks it through.

If you’re looking for a really sexy book, this isn’t it. There’s no real pornography here, though there are certainly some saucy poems. The more I read in it, though, the more impressed I was by the delicacy and tact with which Stu had negotiated these deep and perplexing waters.

“Sex had a lot to do with it,” the Smithyman quote with which he leads off his preface, does (as Stu says) remain “true of both poetry and life.” Before I read this book I wasn’t sure that such an anthology could be compiled without fatal compromises on some level or other. I admit it. I was wrong. This isn’t just a pillow-book for courting couples. I think anyone could read it with pleasure and profit.
- brief #36 (2008): 114-18.

A lot of what I had to say about that earlier anthology applies equally well to this one, Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry (ISBN 978-0-473-13767-0) available from a good bookshop near you, or - more directly - from Antediluvian Press for $29.00 plus postage.

The JAFA gag is a good one, I think. "Just Another Funloving Aucklander," as one of our former mayors put it. It's the choice of cover picture that really nails it for me, though - that marvellous Killeen image of a grim geeky-looking guy with receding hairline and barrier-like newspaper, sedulously ignoring the wild volcanic landscape proliferating behind him.

The theme of Stu's anthology turns out to be something very like Killeen's picture: the contrast between "The farting noise of the trucks that grind their way down Queen Street" and "the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches," as Baxter put it in his classic "Ode to Auckland" (pp.47-49). Has the latter really been "drowned forever," though, as Baxter claimed? Our poets seem to be divided over the question.

On the one hand there is Kendrick Smithyman, jolted out of the humdrum of his everyday by the apparition of twin yachts tacking below the bridge:

They were ballet. they were sculpture.
Most, they were poems, formalized speaking
to right order, shaping abstraction,
humanizing commerce
between man and man, man and water.
- "About Setting a Jar on a Hill" (p.20-21)


But there's also the social conscience of Bill Sewell's "Onehunga Wharf, 1971" (pp.94-95):
... on the other harbour,
the turbid one to the south,
the one that confounds sailors
with the teeth at its mouth.

... twenty years on from the confrontation,
and as far away from the truth.

"I have not set out to panegyrize the city," claims Stu in his Editor's Note. "Zig-zagging the isthmus from east to west, this is a 'fantastic' portage in the sene of some of the less commonly used meanings of that word."

That is indeed the strength of the book, I think, the fantastic, proliferating variety of its imaginative worlds, from Sam Hunt's flesh-coloured Castor Bay (p.10) to Karlo Mila's "iridescent / trickster / of a city" ("Octopus Auckland:" pp.96-99). Stu's gone to a lot of trouble to include as many as possible of the city's competing, polyphonous voices.

He himself acknowledges "the fact that I've travelled with the baggage of my gender, cultural background, experiences and age," but then of course the same proviso would apply to any other anthologist just as much. A more complete cross-section of approaches and styles might risk dissolving into cacophony. The strength of Stu's work is this sense of a coherent design behind it.

I'm left with the interesting fact that one of the poets I think significantly (though somewhat predictably) under-represented in this book is Stu Bagby himself. The two poems of his which he does include are among the very strongest in the collection. There doesn't seem any better way of summing up the charm and distinction of Stu's book than by quoting from the first of these, "Thorne Bay" (p.11):

... I look out across
the channel to Rangitoto and back
to the rocks which were once one

with that place. And the small
trajectory of time that is this morning
compels the stranger and me to speak,
and when we have done that

we say: "See you later,"
like saying hello to ourselves.

Whaddaya reckon? A good Chrissie prezzie for the out-of-town rellies? We jafas do tend to get kind of a bad press, after all ...