Monday, June 11, 2007


AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART


Following on from the marvellous session, The Hole in the Hedge, presented by Peter Wells at the recent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, my interest in Frank Sargeson was quickened.


Hunting on my bookshelves I finally found the superb 2003 Cape Catley publication by Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford, An Affair of the Heart-a Celebration of Frank Sargeson's Centenary, with its marvellous cover featuring an Anthony Stones painting of Sargeson.

The anthology comprises a series of poems, short stories, excerpts and essays recalling Sargeson's generosity and spirit written by writers who knew Sargeson or were influenced by him. Many of NZ's finest contemporary writers are here including Maurice Gee, Owen Marshall, CK Stead, Sarah Quigley, Kapka Kassabova, Shona Koea, the late Michael King and many others.

This book is still in print and should be on the shelf of everyone interested in the life and writing of Frank Sargeson.

Footnotes:

1.Searching on my bookshelves, which are not well organised, is a time consuming business as I am constantly distracted the books that I come across that sometimes have not crossed my vision in years!


2.Anthony Stones did a number of paintings and two bronze sculptures of Frank Sargeson. These sculptures are owned by the Takapuna Public Library in Auckland and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

Stones is an internationally recognised sculptor working in bronze who has a huge amount of fine work to his credit including a number of large public sculptures in New Zealand, (Peter Fraser, Jean Batten among them), as well as many figures from the art world, (in NZ they include Colin McCahon, RAK Mason, Allen Curnow and Sargeson), including several leading 20th century Irish writers most of which are on display in the Dublin Writers Museum.
We should never allowed Stones to escape from New Zealand!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think Anthony Stones has lived in NZ for many years

Beattie's Book Blog said...

Yes, it is probably around 15-18 years ago now I suspect.
Way back in the early 80's he and I ran a few marathons and we used to train together. In those days I was at Penguin Books and he was Head of Design at South Pacific Television, our offices were close to each other in the Wairau Rd area of Auckland's North Shore and so we used to meet up at lunchtime to run; the subject was often NZ lit and Frank Sargeson.

Paul Reynolds said...

Funny old world - at lunch time today I was sitting in Auckland Central Library talking to one of the senior managment about audio books - e- books , et al.
As part of this discussion we talked about Word Pictures, the one time New Zealand audio books peole. John O'Leary, who also has a lot of great drama credits, did some great radio drama production, did an absolutely marvellous reading of some of Sargesons tales .
He has the character to a T. I think National Radio rebroadcast them a couple of years ago.
It would be brillaint if we could get them back on air - this time online!!!