The Essence of Words

If books and literature in novel and short story form are the power of words, then poetry may be considered the essence or flavour of words. Sometimes short and pithy, sometimes longer and rambling, they take the reader on a personal journey.



Auckland Libraries now has a fantastic resource for all poetry lovers that you can access with your library card.


Columbia Granger's World of Poetry contains over 250,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations. The poems in full text are the most widely-read in the English language, as well as in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Included also is poetry in Portuguese, Polish, Yiddish, Welsh, Gaelic, and other Celtic languages, as well as poems in the ancient languages: Anglo-Saxon, Provencal and Latin. There is complete coverage of the works of several individual great poets, including the complete poems of Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and other major poets.

In addition you will find a wealth of current poetry from some of the best poetry periodicals, such as Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Plus you can find commentaries on the poems and biographies of the poet's lives. Full text copies of entire books are included in the resource including titles on Chinese and Asian literature.

If poetry closer to home is more your think, pick up the just released Chords & other poems by Kiwi balladeer Sam Hunt. This slim volume contains the melancholic irreverance I have come to expect from Sam Hunt. It suits the moods of the rainy cold winter months admirably.

The cookbook that inspired!

The other book I finally felt that I had to part with over the weekend (actually it is on hold for someone else so it had to go back) was the Tin Goose Cafe Cookbook (Jeanie Watson).

The first Tin Goose Cafe opened in Cromwell in 2003. Since then it has been joined by Cafe's in Alexandra and Queenstown, all still run by the Watson family. The cafe's are inspired by Central Otago and look for simple fresh regional food, delivered with style.

I saw this cookbook go past when it was checked in from one of our Auckland customers up visiting. It looked fresh and inviting (not that it takes much for me to open up a new cookbook). But even better than that. The recipes looked simple and many contained no more than half a dozen ingredients, all of which I knew I usually had in my pantry. It was Kiwi, so there were no strange names for these ingredients (or ones that I had to translate from the American). And it was all food that I loved to eat. The Amazing Cheese Scones really are amazing. The Zesty Lemon Slice has the best zesty tang. And the Cappuccino Soup puts a whole new spin on uses for a martini glass.

This cookbook was so good it inspired two things.

• I got in touch with Jeanie and ordered a copy for my foodie friend's birthday, which arrived promptly the next day - Thanks Jeanie.



• With the help of the book and some celebrating for said friend's birthday, it was decided that the next girls weekend away was going to be to Central Otago. Guess where we plan on having brunch (or lunch)?

Jeanie told me that she is currently working on Cookbook number 2. I can hardly wait (or should that be weight). There is also a recent article about her on the TV3 news lifestyle page (which is probably why the demand for this cookbook at the libraries has suddenly increased).

A satisfying taste of red.

I am currently trying to read my way through some of the books on the NZ best seller lists. The first title to hit my desk on Friday was Scarlet by Leigh Marsden. This title was much hyped by Publishers Penguin on it's release as "the most sexually explicit book ever published in New Zealand". I'm not sure if this is true or not (given that Penguin were also the Publishers for Christine Leov-Lealand) but it was very good publicity and may be one of the reasons why it is on the best seller list. It is however not the only reason.

Leaving aside that there is a reasonable amount of graphic sexual content in the book (especially in the first half), what I found on reading Scarlet is a tight and interesting tale of George which skips between the present and the past to tell us how she got to be how she is, and what she is going to do about it. There are some very strongly drawn characters, some very deep soul searching and an extremely just resolution. George is strong, sassy and flawed which is just how I like heroines to be. Some of the plot may be a little far-fetched (or maybe not?) but the dialogue is realistic and the action never outpaces the story. The author doesn't shy away from keeping the local taste of Auckland describing streets and places in Auckland so that I can see the action in my mind in places I know.

Overall, this was a satisfying and enjoyable read. Fans of Kiwi authors such as Michelle Holman and perhaps Sarah Kate Lynch should enjoy it. An interview with the author can be found on the Stuff website

HOWZAT! Top 5 for Friday

It may seem like the wrong time of the year to talk cricket. It's cold, wet, muddy (but still not really snowing in the right places). We've just had the shortest day (and the longest night). The Super 15 is heading into sudden death, the Silver Ferns are off to claim another world title (albiet in the slightly warmer climes of Singapore) and everywhere you look there are adverts for that other winter game's World Cup (the oval ball one).

But somewhere in the world, it is summer and people are playing cricket. Long summer days, a gentle breeze and a cold drink. As we head into the coldest wettest part of winter we have just selected a new Black Caps captain and there are plenty of people out there who are hanging out for cricket season again. A colleague in Auckland Central is one of them. So here for your enjoyment is Annie's Top 5 cricket reads.

I don’t like cricket. No. I love it. Ah. Summer. The strains of ‘Dreadlock holiday’ run through my mind. And, I sit back and relax. Watching cricket. Doesn’t really matter whose playing. The secret – especially for test matches – is that you can do something else while it’s on. Look up and see the replays. Go those Ashes. You should have seen the look on the sales assistant’s face when I asked for an AM/FM radio – not a fancy-dancy MP3 / i-thingy... AM completely necessary – how else will I get Radio Sport and cricket commentary while commuting to and from work?
To honour the joy cricket brings, here are my top 5 cricket reads.

5. Howzat!: Hadlee's tales from the boundary / Sir Richard Hadlee.
Hadlee spend a lot of time taking wickets, scoring runs, and collecting yarns. If you need a few laughs, then check out this collection of the best yarns. And there are some goodies here.

4. Cricket speak / Justin Brown
Confused by cricket? Then this entertaining volume will help clear things up.

3. NIPS XI / Ruth Starke
Such fun! A real insight into how pervasive cricket is in Australia – and the lives of migrant children.

2. Christmas in Rarotonga / John Wright.
Find out more about the Black Caps’ coach in this entertaining read. Reminisce about the days when New Zealand cricket nearly ruled the world. And the team wore beige. Someone in my family bought it for our dad many many years ago. It now lives at the family bach, and I happily re-read it while lazy around listening to crackly commentary on the radio. Just like the old days.

1. Penguins stopped play: eleven village cricketers take on the world / Harry Thompson.
This was such fun to read. A real celebration of cricket, and the ‘madness’ its tragics suffer. I’ve read this a couple of times, and highly recommend it. "It seemed a simple enough idea at the outset: to assemble a team of eleven men to play cricket on each of the seven continents of the globe. Except - hold on a minute - that's not a simple idea at all. And when you throw in incompetent airline officials, amorous Argentine Colonels' wives, cunning Bajan drug dealers, gay Australian waiters, overzealous American anti-terrorist police, idiot Welshmen dressed as Santa Claus, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and whole armies of pitch-invading Antarctic penguins, you quickly arrive at a whole lot more than you bargained for. Harry Thompson's hilarious book tells the story of one of those great idiotic enterprises that only an Englishman could have dreamed up, and only a bunch of Englishmen could possibly have wished to carry out." (Also available in large print and on audio)

Who do YOU trust?

Trust. It's a simple little five letter word but there is so much to it both in everyday life and again on a much deeper level. Is trust believing everything you hear, everything you read? Do you need to see the evidence? Or is it a gut instinct? Maybe (if you are anything like me) it depends on the circumstances. You want to believe what people tell you, but sometimes you take that with the proverbial "grain of salt".

The reason for this discussion is the publication of the seventh annual Reader's Digest Most Trusted list. It makes interesting reading and in some respects ties into the whole concept of trust and needing to have people prove or provide evidence that they can be trusted. Because several of the most trusted people on this year's list are those that look for evidence and proof. They are the scientists and they rank as first, second and third most trusted Kiwi's in 2011.

New Zealand's most trusted man is Sir Ray Avery. You can find out more about him in his very popular biography Rebel with a Cause published in 2010. Ray Avery is an amazing person. He is the current New Zealander of the Year because of his clever work in the Third World using his scientific and business knowledge to provide cheap cataract operations, cheap and more effective incubators for babies and other creative scientific solutions. His childhood was very 'Angela's Ashes', brought up in an orphanage (his own mother had tried to sell him!), then running away and living on the streets. But Ray went on to become a scientist, a millionaire, a very successful businessman and now someone who literally does help to change the world. During the mid nineties Ray spent most of his time working in Eritrea and Nepal, setting up two world class intraocular lens laboratories. At that time the cost of an intraocular lenses was about US$300 but Ray managed to put the technology together to produce lenses for under US$10.00, making modern cataract surgery accessible to the poor throughout Africa and Asia.Today these laboratories produce over 10% of the world's supply of intraocular lenses. Today he encourages other talented people to get on board and tackle some of the really big problems confronting the poor in developing countries. From his garage in Mt Eden Auckland Ray manages a global network of experts to work on specific projects and somehow everyone finds themselves donating their time and knowledge for free and they are rewarded by making a difference" --Publisher description.

Number 2 on the list is Sir Peter Gluckman, the Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister. He is the author or co-author of several books held by Auckland Libraries including Mismatch - Why our lives no longer fit our bodies. He has also recently produced, at the request of the Prime Minister, a comprehensive piece of research into youth and looking at factors affecting the high rate of suicide amongst Kiwi teenagers and possible ways to prevent this.

Making it a trifecta for the scientists is number 3 on the list, current New Zealander of the Year, Sir Paul Callaghan. He is a physicist who is also author and editor of several titles on our shelves. Amongst the most intriguing is As far as we know : conversations about science, life and the universe As Far As We Know answers some of the oldest and most perplexing questions that have been posed about science - from what existed before the Big Bang to the rise of Homo sapiens. In their discussions, Kim Hill and Paul Callaghan consider some of the most momentous concepts of our time and in the process make science understandable, and, above all, entertaining and interesting. Reading this may go some way to also answering the question as to why we are ranking scientists so highly in the trustworthy stakes.

There are a fair smattering of entertainers, sportspeople, heroes and celebrities in the list. Politicians don't fare so well this year. The full list of the Top 100 people is on the Reader's Digest website (which contains lots of other interesting information). If you want to do your own research into whether you think the list is right (or wrong) then check out the biography section at your local library or one of our digital resources.