This is Mark's blog.
My publishing company HeadworX has just released eminent New Zealand poet John O'Connor's 10th book of poetry, Aspects of Reality.
For full details on the book and author visit the HeadworX website:
http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz/poetry/aspects.php
Copies can be purchased from me directly using the contact form on this website.
The eleventh issue of my poetry journal, broadsheet: new new zealandpoetry, features the North American poet, Cameron La Follette. The issue is the first to feature La Follette's work internationally. It includes comment on her work by Niel Wright and myself.
Also included is new work by Tony Beyer, Richard Berengarten (UK), John Dennison, Michael Duffett (USA), John O'Connor, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Laura Morris, P V Reeves, and two poets of New Zealand's literary past O E Hugo (1855-1915) and Erihapeti Murchie (1923-1997).
To read the online pdf of the issue, go to:
http://broadsheetnz.wordpress.com
I wrote the following new poem, Sidelights, watching the Hurricanes play the Blues at Eden Park in April. It was a very good game to watch.
The Blues performance is a credit to their coach Sir John Kirwan.
It was published by Tony Chad in the poetry journal Valley Micropress, April 2013.
Click on the link to read the poem: Sidelights.
A brief but very good mention of the book I edited, King Willow: Selected Poems by Robert J Pope, appeared in the latest issue of the Cricket Society's Journal:
JOHN SYMONS
Review of King Willow: Selected Poems by Robert J Pope edited by Mark Pirie
HeadworX Publishing web: http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz
Mark Pirie is continuing to explore New Zealand literary history both old and new and here we have a selection of poems from a writer, Robert J Pope whose life (1865-1949) covered the birth of New Zealand cricket through to Walter Hadlee's determination on the post-war tour of England to be worthy of full-length Test Matches.
Although, well-regarded in his lifetime as with many poets, he became unfashionable although there now seems to be a reappraisal of his work. The selection from his work set out here contains only a single cricketing poem but his other work is well worth modern consideration. There is a wistful and elegiac tone to his war poetry - no drums and bugles and hurrahs - more sadness at lives lost and friends no longer to be greeted.
The only cricket poem "King Willow" was written to welcome in the 1932 season but there is a small section of cricket prose at the end of the book. I also liked his affectionate parody of W B Yeats in Billy's Tea which made me smile.
Not really enough perhaps to convince the cricket collector to add this to his library but Mark Pirie is ploughing a singular furrow as he explores the byways of New Zealand literature and deserves the praise that he is garnering. A writer and a publisher who are always worth seeking out.
(From The Journal of the Cricket Society, UK, Volume 26, No. 4, Spring 2013, p. 69-70).