Excerpt / Release

Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems

Edited by Philip Temple & Emma Neale (Otago U Press, $35)

We are grateful to Otago University Press and to Maraea Rakuraku and Vaughan Rapatahana for permission to reproduce their poems below, just two of the 101 included in this collection. Click here for more information about the ‘Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems.

For those of you who insist on using the term Te Urewera 17, 12 or 4 to accompany any newspaper headline or media soundbite. by Maraea Rakuraku

anglican prattle. by Vaughan Rapatahana

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Excerpt / Release

Ice Bear: The cultural history of an arctic icon

by Michael Engelhard (University of Washington Press, paper, $US29.95)

If art’s mission is to change public perceptions or to transcend established practices, it can no longer be apolitical, unaware of social or economic currents. The creators of an exhibit that examines the “cultural afterlife” of taxidermised polar bears (nanoq: flat out and bluesome, by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson) sum up a rather recent shift in our attitudes toward their subject: “During the last decade the image of the polar bear has moved in the public imagination from being an icon of strength, independence and survival in one of the most climatically extreme of world environments, to that of fragility, vulnerability and more generally of a global environmental crisis.”

Donald Gialanella’s ‘Spirit of the North,’ concept for a sixty-foot sculpture welded from scrap automobiles for a downtown park in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Donald Gialanella)

Their latest project, Matrix, focuses on the bears’ maternity dens in Svalbard, “perfectly adapted model[s] for habitat in the arctic environment.” Since the Rodin pupil Francois Pompon’s L’Ours Blanc (1922), the language of polar bear art has changed, as have its approaches. Read more »