Showing posts with label Pania Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pania Press. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Pania Press Giveaway!




Bronwyn is inviting people to enter a giveaway competition over at her blog Mosehouse Studio. All you have to do is leave a comment on her latest post by this Friday (24th September).

The prize is a copy of Pania Press's new publication: Michele Leggott's poetry chapbook Northland, available in a numbered, limited edition of seventy-five copies.




Go on! What do you have to lose? Alternatively, you could buy the book from the Pania site for $55, or (as usual) from Parsons Bookshop in Auckland.

I suspect this book will become a collector's item. How could it not? Once we've sold those sixty-odd copies, we don't plan to print any more.



Saturday, August 09, 2008

Pania goes 3D



This is just to signal the latest entry on the Pania Press blog, outlining our new book series-in-progress Pania Peculiars, Pania Playscripts and Pania Singles.

Bronwyn has described the genesis of some of her new 3D techniques in the write-up accompanying all the pretty pictures of pop-ups and puppet theatres (taken with the wonderful new digital camera she got for her birthday -- thanks again, June and John!).

Check it out here.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Pania Strikes Again



So Pania Press's Opus 3 is now out and ready for purchase.

This time we've branched out from poetry chapbooks, and are offering a sumptuous handmade art catalogue instead.

The book is THE ETERNALS. It's designed to accompany Graham Fletcher's show of the same name, on display in the Anna Bibby Gallery, Newmarket, between 2 and 26 October.

The book includes an essay on Graham's work by Bronwyn Lloyd, "Tar-Babies & Taboos," a full chronology of his work to date, and - most excitingly of all - a unique, original drawing by the artist.

Each of these drawings records one of the sculptures in his show, so (as you can imagine) some collectors of Graham's work have already gone to considerable trouble to try and hunt down the drawing that matches their sculpture ...

That's why we've had to limit this edition to 45 signed, individually-numbered copies. There won't be a reprint, so if you're interested, it might be advisable to get in quickly.

Details of how to order the book are available on the Pania Press website here.

The price is $75, payable either by cheque or bank transfer.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Pania Press and the quality known as "wu"

... Here is a piece of metal which has been melted until it has become shapeless. It represents nothing. Nor does it have design, of any intentional sort. It is merely amorphous. One might say, it is mere content, deprived of form.’

Childan nodded.

‘Yet,’ Paul said, ‘I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. Why is that? I may ask. I do not even now project into this blob, as in psychological German tests, my own psyche. I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. You see?’ He motioned Childan over. ‘It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. It has separated from it and hence has managed to come to homeostasis.’

Childan nodded, studied the piece. But Paul had lost him.

‘It does not have wabi,’ Paul said, ‘nor could it ever. But—’ He touched the pin with his nail. ‘Robert, this object has wu.’

‘I believe you are right,’ Childan said, trying to recall what wu was; it was not a Japanese word — it was Chinese. Wisdom, he decided. Or comprehension. Anyhow, it was highly good.

‘The hands of the artificer,’ Paul said, ‘had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I. am deeply moved, as you may see.’

‘Yes,’ Childan said ...

[Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 161-62.]

The quality known as wu. Pania Press books partake of that feeling also, I believe. They, too, are handcrafted from what might otherwise seem insignificant materials – a few pieces of thread, some sheets of paper – and yet each one is unique, with a unique and individual cover design.

Philip K. Dick’s Japanese businessman goes on to explain to the American Childan that ‘it is a fact that wu is customarily found in least imposing places, as in the Christian aphorism, “stones rejected by the builder.’” (The context gives this dialogue particular poignancy, but if you haven’t yet read his 1962 classic, where he imagines a world where German and Japan won the second World War, I’ll have to leave that up to your imagination).

Anyway, this post is just to signal that Pania Press’s first two commercial publications are now available for purchase. You can read more about them, and read sample poems, at the Pania Press blogsite, but I’ll just say here that:

many things happened, by Thérèse Lloyd, is a delightful and moving first collection of ten lyrics by a poet who will soon be jetting off to Iowa on a scholarship set up by Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters.



Love in Wartime, by yours truly, is -- for me –- an unusually direct sequence of poems about love and loss. It seems a rather timely subject for meditation just now. Enjoy.



Saturday, December 09, 2006

Pania Press


The very lovely Bronwyn Lloyd and I have started a small press together. It's called Pania Press, and will specialise in small limited editions of original texts by local poets and artists, with individual handcrafted covers.

The first three books (slated to go on sale next year) are:

1/ Jack Ross, Love in Wartime
(a sequence of poems with illustrations and accompanying texts)

2/ Therese Lloyd, many things happened
(a debut poetry collection from this promising young writer, who recently completed her Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters)

3/ Michele Leggott, hello and goodbye
(a new sequence of poems by one of New Zealand's brightest poetic luminaries)

Future titles will be announced as they become available, but the point of this post is just to direct you to the Pania Press blogsite we've set up to advertise (and sell!) our wares. Get in quick -- there won't be many copies of each one to go around ...