Owen Bullock

Making Canons and Finding Flowers: a Study of Selected New Zealand Poetry Anthologies Owen Bullock

This book evaluates a sample of New Zealand Poetry Anthologies covering the 1940s to the 1980s. It assesses how the intentions, knowledge and tastes of the anthology editors have influenced the representation of New Zealand poetry. Changes in the content of the poetry are observed, as well as the techniques that were used. Allen Curnow's influential anthologies of 1945 and 1960 were concerned mostly with the topic of literary nationalism. From the mid-1960s, trends emerged linked to possibilities offered by American poetry and perhaps to a search for greater freedom of expression in general. By the mid-1970s, New Zealand's poetic canon was well established on the strength of publications from Penguin and Oxford University Press, but poetry by women seemed under-represented. Despite increased publication of writing by women poets from the late 1960s onwards, many years passed before women's writing was fully acknowledged in major anthologies. A new bias emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s in favour of work from the University Presses, but, in recent years, anthologies that present some alternative point of view of New Zealand's literary history have proliferated.