Paekakariki Xpressed – Book of the Month

The following brief review of A Tingling Catch appeared in Paekakariki Xpressed newspaper, Friday 17 September 2010, page 20. Kakariki Books, Paekakariki Railway Station, named the anthology their Book of the Month:

Kakariki Books: Book of the Month

A Tingling Catch, edited by the Wellington poet and publisher Mark Pirie, brings together almost a century and a half of New Zealand’s writing about and eulogising the virtues of that most arcane of games.

This book has been painstakingly put together, many hours of searching through often no longer available books and magazines covering almost the whole period of poetry publishing in this country. The result is delightful and illuminating. People you would never associate with the ‘flannelled fools’ turn out to be fans, among them some of our most heralded writers.

From Thomas Bracken and William Pember Reeves, to Arnold Wall and J.H.E. Schroder, to Elizabeth Smither, David Mitchell and Denis Glover, this book holds many surprises. Pirie provides an informative introduction and there is a foreword by New Zealand cricket historian, Don Neely.