| |
| | Jacket 16 - Philip Mead reviews Three books of New Zealand poetry |
 | | Big Smoke is a kind of poetry doco-anthology of a specific period in recent New Zealand history, the decade and a half of the 60s and early to mid-70s, a time of crisis, modernisation and independence in New Zealand (as in Australia). |
 | | True to its Situationist (anti-academic) allegiances, Big Smoke is conceived in the mode of festivity, of dancing on the grave of ‘heavy structure, orthodox forms, templates, measure, ponderousness, irony, maintenance of distance, denial of attachment to the work’ (14) — ‘Poetry Will Be Made By All Not By One’. |
 | | Poetry in the Sixties was written in the name of individual freedom, rejection of all social constructs, hedonistic desire to escape predictability, in the case of justice attempting to redress past wrongs, in a prosperity made possible by social discipline and national exporting agencies. |
| jacketmagazine.com /16/mead-nz.html (3827 words) |
|