Latest news

May 2010

There's a very positive review of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima by Vana Manasiadis by Julia Cooper in The Lumiere Reader. You can read it here: http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/ithaca-island-bay-leaves/.

April 2010

Vana Manasiadis, author of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima is interviewed on Tim Jones's popular blog: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/04/interview-with-vana-manasiadis.html. She talks about the genesis of this collection, and what she's working on next.

February 2010

Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima has had two positive reviews in the weekend papers: Hamesh Wyatt in the Otago Daily Times, and Paula Green in the New Zealand Herald.

January 2010

Vana Manasiadis, author of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, was interviewed by Lynn Freeman on the Arts of Sunday programme on Radio New Zealand National on 31 January 2010. You can listen to the interview on the Radio New Zealand site here: http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/national/art/2010/01/31/poetry_-_vana_manasiadis

December 2009

The author arrived from Crete on Monday, the book arrived from the printers on Tuesday, and we launched Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima by Vana Manasiadis with an enthusiastic crowd on Wednesday 3rd December in the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University.

The Adam Art Gallery was the perfect venue, as the launch took place among Greek vases and Greek-vase-inspired lithographs by Marian Maguire, whose lithograph Athena Observes a Fracas graces the cover of Ithaca.

Damien Wilkins, who was the course convener of Vana's masters in creative writing class, launched the book. He had been around during its genesis, and so it was appropriate he should send it out into the world. He'd read it in its earlier incarnation as Vana's masters portfolio, and said that, reading it again, it seemed to have gotten younger. I think I know what he means. While it was almost all there in that earlier form, the work Vana has done on it over the last few years have made each poem sharper, more of what it is.

October 2009

Watching for Smoke, by Helen Heath, was launched with much fun, music and celebration (and pikelets) at St Peter's Hall in Paekakariki on the 18th of October. Local poet Dinah Hawken, who is also Helen's supervisor for her MA in creative writing, did the honours.

Copies of this limited-edition, hand-bound chapbook will be available from Unity Books in Wellington, or can be ordered through your local bookshop or direct from Seraph Press.