Saturday Morning for Saturday 6 December 2014

8:15 Eldon Tate

Eldon Tate is a PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington, who this week received $10,000, along with business support and mentoring advice, as an AMP National Scholarship recipient. He aims to create a solar-powered water treatment system, using unique nano-composite materials he has created in his research, to generate clean drinking water. He will use the Scholarship to build a prototype to test the project’s viability.

8:30 Karl Iremonger

 is Principal Investigator at the Centre for Neuroendocrinology in the Department of Physiology at the University of Otago. This week he was awarded the 2014 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for work on fertility circuits in the brain. His research is currently focused on understanding how stress networks in the brain process information and adapt in a changing environment.

9:05 Jane Gleeson-White

Australian writer Jane Gleeson-White has degrees in economics and literature and is the author of the prize-winning 2011 book Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World. Her new book is Six Capitals: the Revolution Capitalism Has to Have – or Can Accountants Save the Planet? (Allen & Unwin, ISBN: 978-1-74331-916-1). (After the interview, Kim referred to this article by Robert Reich)

10:05 Playing Favourites with Tom Scott

Lyricist and vocalist Tom Scott is a member of the groups HomeBrew and @Peace, and the Young Gifted & Broke collective of artists, and is now based in Melbourne. Since his last appearance on the programme in 2012, HomeBrew’s debut double album went to number one on the New Zealand charts, and @Peace have followed their 2012 debut with two more albums, Girl Songs and @ Peace and the Plutonian Noise Symphony. Tom also recorded a Guide to Melbourne for Music 101.

11:05 Yvonne Todd

Auckland photographer Yvonne Todd won the inaugural Walters Prize in 2002 for her final-year submission at Elam, Asthma & Eczema, and her work has been showcased in numerous exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Creamy Psychology, curated by Robert Leonard, is the largest exhibition of her work to date, and includes around 150 images made since the 1990s. It is showing at City Gallery Wellington (6 December 2014 to 1 March 2015), the first time the entire gallery has been devoted to just one artist. An illustrated book, Creamy Psychology (Victoria University Press, ISBN: 978-0-86473-977-3), accompanies the exhibition and features contributions from Todd, Leonard, and other curators and critics.

Photo by Yvonne Todd; Goat Sluice. More images by Yvonne Todd can be seen in this gallery.

11:35 Poetry 2014 with Gregory O’Brien

Gregory O'Brien is a painter, poet, curator and writer, and his exhibition of paintings, Whale Years, is showing at Tauranga Art Gallery to 8 February 2015. Greg discussed his highlights of New Zealand poetry in 2014, a banner year, and lists his awards below(most, but not all, mentioned on the programme).

Young Country by Karry Hines (AUP, ISBN: 978-1-86940-823-7) gets the prize for book production of the year: design, typography, print-job, concept, illustrations (William Williams' remarkable views of 1880s New Zealand) and a plaintive, endlessly resonating text.

The inaugural James Joyce Memorial Award for unabashed, unfettered but utterly justifiable experimentation is shared by two essential books: Sam Sampson's Halcyon Ghosts (AUP, ISBN: 978-1-869-40816-9) and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Autobiography of a Marguerite (Hue & Cry, ISBN: 978-0-473-28412-1).

The Kim Hill Prize for poetry book cover goes to Marty Smith's Horse with Hat (VUP, ISBN: 978-0-86473-927-8), cover by Brendan O'Brien ( who is the brother of Greg, so the younger O'Brien had no comment to make on this deliberation!)

The award for The Poet With the Best First Lines goes to Caoilinn Hughes, author of Gathering Evidence (VUP, ISBN: 978-0-86473-926-1). Among the opening lines here gathered are:
When the avalache came down on us  ... (Avalanche)
As we watch the seated evening across the field  ... (On the content of brackets)
We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks  ... (We are experiencing delay)
Heaven knows the planets are not silent in their orbits  ... (Harmony of the spheres)

Maria McMillan, author of Tree Space (VUP, ISBN: 978-0-86473-928-5), takes the prize for Best Poem Titles:
You would be immersed in bees
Irena is in an earthquake having just fallen out of love
They are roaring through the clouds very assuredly
How they came to privatise the night
Sometimes we remind ourselves terribly of ourselves

Maria McMillan and Louise Wrightson - author of Otari (Otari Press, ISBN: 978-0-473-28879-2) take out the Green Prize for 'nature' poetry. (Appropriately, they are co-leaders in the field of Green.)

The prize for the Shortest Poem of the Year (from a book of remarkable poems, not all of which are short) goes to Frances Samuel for Anorexia, from her collection Sleeping on Horseback (VUP, ISBN: 978-0-864-73972-8)
Anorexia
electric doors
don't sense her

Best book by a poet which is not exactly a book of poetry: Stephanie de Montalk's How Does It Hurt? (VUP, ISBN: 978-0-864-73969-8).

The book that made me think about what it is that poetry does, and how our relationship with our language is central to our humanity: Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton Press, ISBN: 978-1-927-21336-0).

A notable political poem in a year blighted by dirty politics: Kevin Ireland's  A song for happy voters, from Feeding the Birds (Steele Roberts)

A favourite poem of the year: Avoid by Tim Upperton from The Night We Ate the Baby by Tim Upperton (HauNui Press, ISBN: 978-0-473-28839-6);

A remarkable book worthy of much wider recognition: Odysseus in Woolloomooloo, Bob Orr (Steele Roberts).

Best title of the year: How to be dead in a year in snakes, Chris Tse (AUP).

The 'Something is Happening Here' award for a remarkable and energising literary arrival: Leilani Tamu with The Art of Excavation (Anahera Press, ISBN: 978-0-473-29004-7).

In a photo-finish between the four main university presses and the staunch independents, the poetry publisher of the year, by a nose, is Cold Hub Press in Lyttelton. In 2014, Cold Hub not only published impeccable editions of selected poems by Peter Olds (You Fit the Descripton, ISBN: 978-0-473-29803-6) and Michael Harlow (Sweeping the Courtyard, ISBN: 978-0-473-27420-7), they also effected a change in the local publishing scene by releasing bi-lingual collections from Latin American writers (among them Dunedin-resident Rogelio Guedea and Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal). Where did Cold Hub come from? Where are they going? I have no idea. But all power to them.

I believe in Books of the Day or the Week or the Month, but not so much Books of the Year. However, if I had to nominate one for 2014 it would be You Fit the Description: Selected poems of Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press). This is a great summary of Olds' poetic output - it captures the measure of the man. If you like Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, James K. Baxter or Geoff Cochrane you'll adore Olds. The book is an exquisite production with a rock-solid introduction by Olds' near-contemporary, Ian Wedde. A life's work, very much alive and going strong....

This Saturday’s team:

Producer: Mark Cubey
Wellington engineer: Brad Warrington
Auckland engineer: Tony Stamp
Dunedin studio: Martin Balch

Research by Anne Buchanan, Infofind

Music played in this show

Dave Grusin: Modaji
From the 1977 album: One of a Kind
(GRP)
Played at around 10:15

Eddie Hazel: California Dreamin'
From the 2006 reissue of the 1977 album: Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs
(Collector’s Choice)
Played at around 10:20

Free Life: There's Something Better
The 1979 single from the album: Free Life
(Epic)
Played at around 10:3

Jerry Butler: Playing On You
The 1974 single from the compilation album: Stepping across the USA Volume 11
(Steppin Muzak)
Played at around 10:35

Neil Young: Vampire Blues
From the 1974 album: On the Beach
(Reprise)
Played at around 10:40