THEN IT WAS NOW AGAIN: selected
critical writing by Murray Edmond
To read this selection from Murray Edmond’s essays, reviews, interviews,
and letters is to take a ride through forty years of New Zealand’s cultural,
social, and political history. Discussions of esoteric art theories, polemical
interventions in literary spats, eyewitness accounts of political tumult, and
anecdotes from the author’s private life are equally at home in this book, as
Edmond carries us from the revolutionary era of his youth through the crises
and conflicts of the eighties into the world of the twenty-first century.
Gathered together I think these essays make one of the most important
contributions to a critical writing we have seen in this country for some
decades. —Peter Simpson
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THE GOLD LEAVES: (being an account
and translation from the ancient greek of the ‘so-called’ orphic gold tablets) by Edward Jenner
The Gold Leaves is a study of ancient (c.400BC–300AD) verses, often
fragmentary, incised on fragile gold leaves that have been found (and continue
to be found) buried in graves and tombs in the culturally Greek parts of the
Mediterranean world. These leaves have been placed carefully, perhaps on the
chest, or in the mouth or in the hand, of the body. The leaves are messages
designed to guide the souls of the dead on their journey to immortality and
paradise.
Jenner aims to bring the Leaves to the attention of the reader who has
no background in the Classics or ancient Greek but shares an interest in
pre-Christian ideas about the soul, the Underworld and the afterlife.
Its sustained and patient close reading puts the modern reader back in
touch with a culture in which poetry, or what resembles it, constituted knowledge
at its most foundational. Somehow these scraps of text on leaves of gold in the
mouths of the dead, humble if they don’t humiliate, poetry as we know it.
—Wystan Curnow
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