Welcome

Recent News

NZ Onscreen now has the 1996 documentary Hone Tuwhare available in full. You can watch it here.

From Bill Lennox’s introduction to Shape-shifter:

When I first worked with Hone Tuwhare, setting up public and educational readings in Auckland and Tai Tokerau, he used to refer me to academic reviewers who had said generous things about his work. As New Zealand’s first major poet who hasn’t had to overcome or deny a university education, he’s had an odd relationship with critics and academics. Some, mainly writers themselves, are old mates. But it took others years to acknowledge and admire what Hone was up to.

At the Wairoa Maori Writers & Artists Hui, 1973.
Photo: John Miller

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

from Rain

In 1975 a reviewer wrote of his “oratorical success.” Tuwhare was “picking his way between rhetoric and throw-away idiom,” had “fine sensual detail” but was often “too slack verbally.”

Perhaps it took Bill Manhire in the book Dirty Silences to provide a legitimate analysis. He described Tuwhare’s “code-switching effects ... He can sound within the space of a couple of lines as if he’s both at church and down at the pub.”

By 1988 Apirana Taylor could explain that Tuwhare “makes the language itself a celebration” and that “there is a serious note behind the gut tickling.”

keep reading...