Charles Brasch: Journals 1938–1945
For most of his adult life, Charles Brasch’s most intimate companion was his diary. In these journals, written in London during the Second World War, he is a young man searching for answers. Is he a pacifist? Should he join the army? Is he homosexual? Should he marry? Should he return home to New Zealand when the war ends? Are his poems any good? Some questions are resolved in the course of the journals, others not, but it all makes compelling reading.
Charles Brasch Journals 1958–1973
This third and final volume of Charles Brasch’s compelling private journals covers the years from when he was 48 to his death at 64.
Charles Brasch: Selected Poems
Charles Brasch (1909–1973) was the founder and first editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s premier journal of literature and ideas. Born in Dunedin, he grew up to be at home in the literature, art and architecture of Europe, but returned to devote his life to the arts in his own country – as editor, critic, collector and patron. Brasch’s vocation, however, was to be a poet. As he said in his memoir Indirections, in writing poems he ‘discovered New Zealand … because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language.’ This selection shows his journey of discovery, as Charles Brasch learned by reading poets such as Rilke, W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves to find his own voice as ‘a citizen of the English language’. It is presented as a beautifully bound cased edition.