Friday 22 July 2011

A second poem for National Poetry Day

It's National Poetry Day today and I'd also like to share a poem that I like from the NZETC Collections.

It's called Love poem for a Geek on Dixon Steps by Airini Beautrais, from Sport 35: Winter 2007.

The poem's title caught my eye mostly because I walk up and down Dixon Steps everyday. The poem is short and sweet, and it enticed me to read more of Airini's poems. It is the first poem in Twenty-three Love Poems, all of which I enjoyed and I hope you enjoy too.

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day so I thought I'd share my favourite poem from the NZETC collection.

When I first started at VUW, I'd recently returned from Oxford, where I'd been quite removed, physically and intellectually, from my years as an undergrad at Canterbury. One of my early tasks was assessing our collection with respect to google suite of tools. I'd not yet really had much to do with the Sport journal, but one of the pages was highly ranked for both "fucking poems" and "fucking poetry" and I instantly connected with the poem. The poem reminds me of two wonderful years I spent as part of the Canterbury Writers Group set up by the then Writer-in-Residence Bernadette Hall (whose Wikipedia entry I would later edit). For me those years were filled with poetry that was long on passion, shock value and pseudonyms but short on writing craft and life experience. We edited two anthologies (Find the Red (which ran to two printings) and Eels in a Bucket); we drank cheap red wine; we supported each other at poetry readings; we got to know the AA crowd (they were in the room immediately before us); in short we had a ball. One of my poems from the period eventually washed ashore in the School Journal, so maybe it wasn't an entirely misspent youth.

All that floods back to me when I read Short Poems About Fucking by James Brown from our Sport collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

stuart yeates

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Māori Language Week

Kia Ora and welcome to Māori language week. The theme for this year's Māori Language week is Manaakitanga or Maori hospitality and Customs. There are several mentions of this term in our collection.

We thought we would take the opportunity to highlight some of our highly used Māori language works.

* A Dictionary of the Maori Language by Herbert W. Williams.

* Nga kōrero a Reweti Kohere Mā by Te Ohorere Kaa and Wiremu Kaa.

* 28 Maori Battalion by J. F. Cody.

These three works are in our ten most accessed items for the past 6 months. We are very pleased to see Maori language works being highly used in our collection.

If your currently studying Te Reo Maori you may like to use the 'Māori-English / English-Māori parallel texts only' search function to show works with translations between the two languages.

We are also looking forward to publishing another Māori work 'Te Whakatuwheratanga o Te Tumu Herenga Waka' or The Opening of Te Tumu Herenga Waka. Te Tumu Herenga Waka is the meeting house at Victoria University of Wellington and this work discusses its founding and the Epa, Poupou and Heke found inside.