O'Brien, Gregory

Gregory O'Brien (b. 1961)

Contents:

New New Zealand Poets in Performance (2008):

Epithalamium, Wellington
It will be better then
Solomon singing
from Great Lake
There is only one

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD26

1. Corfu from below Ascension
2. Epithalamium, Wellington
3. It will be better then
4. Solomon singing
5. Numbers 1 & 2
6. There is only one

Bio / Bibliography:

Gregory O’Brien is a Wellington-based poet, reviewer, editor, anthologist and painter. Born in Matamata in 1961, he trained first as a journalist, working in that capacity in Northland before returning to tertiary study at the University of Auckland. (He received a BA in English and Art History in 1984.) Since then, he has worked as a freelance writer, editor and illustrator. He has also exhibited widely as a painter, and is the author of small monographs on the artists Nigel Brown and Ralph Hotere. His first book of poems, Location of the Least Person, appeared in 1987. He has since published a further six collections of poems, a verse novella, Malachi (1993), and a novel, Diesel Mystic (1989). O’Brien has also been active as an art and literary critic - his reviews and art criticism appear regularly in New Zealand newspapers, magazines and journals. He has also written a number of exhibition catalogues. In 1996 he co-edited an anthology of New Zealand love poems, My Heart Goes Swimming, and in 1997 was co-editor of the Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. 2002’s After Bathing at Baxter’s is a collection of essays and notes on New Zealand artists and writers.

Poetry:

Location of the Least Person, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987
Dunes and Barns, Auckland: Modern House, 1988
Man With a Child’s Violin, Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1990
Great Lake, Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1991
Days Beside Water, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993
Irishman & Industry: poems, Auckland: Pear Tree Press, 1998
Winter I Was, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1999

Novels:

Diesel Mystic: a Novel, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989
Malachi: an Entertainment, North Adelaide: South Australian Publishing Ventures and Futures, 1993

Anthologies:

My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems, (ed. with Jenny Bornholdt), Auckland: Godwit, 1996
An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, (ed. with Jenny Bornholdt and Mark Williams), Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997

Other works:

Moments of Invention: Portraits of 21 New Zealand Writers, Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1988
Nigel Brown, Auckland: Random Century, 1991
Hotere: Out the Black Window: Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets, Auckland: Godwit, 1997
After bathing at Baxter’s: essays and notebooks, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002