Waimarino County and Other Excursions

A new work from a master prose stylist, this is a book of essays described as ‘elegant discursions on themes of memory, words and travel’. Edmond has developed over four books now an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging way of writing that always draws on himself and his own often quite intimate experience. Yet his writing is never egotistical or self-absorbed; it turns outwards, to the past, to the landscape and the natural world, to other writers and artists, to journeys and distant places. Though held together by a single consciousness the book is divided into four sections, ‘Autobiographies’, mostly memories of a New Zealand childhood and adolescence, ‘Meditations’ on subjects ranging from the Rosetta Stone to the late Alan Brunton, ‘Illusions’, on dreams and visions, and ‘Voices’, a long essay on the mysterious identity of the writer. Waimarino County confirms the view that Martin Edmond is a major voice in our literature.