"A personal exploration of, and homage to, some of the important New Zealand poets [authors] and painters of the 20th century"--Back cover.

Includes index.

"The public interest : an annotated bibliography, 1988-2001"--p. 260-282.

Black square dance: an introduction -- I. An Alphabet Without Edges -- After bathing at Baxter's -- Southern Woman - Ruth Dallas -- An alphabet without edges - from a Janet Frame notebook -- Imagine the imagination - Margaret Mahy's Dissolving Ghost -- A journey around Kendrick Smithyman's Atua Wera -- High cultural life - Eric McCormick's An Absurd Ambition -- Widening horizons and worlds regained: a conversation / Dennis McEldowney -- II. The Shape of Living -- Morning Glory in Springtime in autumn - self-portrait -- An attempt at the first page of an autobiography -- The shape of living children I -- Lost and living children -- Aspects of his face -- East born -- Wild horses -- The exact size of the world -- The dark plane leaves at evening -- North Piha bach with typewriter -- The second Ada -- Radio Birdman -- A long sentence in Czech ending in English -- The shape of living children II -- The man who wrote the book about the weather -- Electricities -- III. Fringe Dwellers -- Blue Monk, Black Light - Ralph Hotere and Thelonious Monk, a notebook -- No road to follow - Eric Lee-Johnson -- These May Mornings in October - Rosalie Gascogne -- Big tree transmission - Colin McCahon's tau cross -- Breaking open the luggage - Denis O'Connor's 'concrete poetry' -- First on the left past the art supermarket, the magic theatre - Martin Edmond's The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont -- I am a shepherd -- Chunk of landscape, chunk of memory - the paintings of Euan Macleod -- Changing the light - Noel McKenna in Taranaki -- The outsider within -- Somebody say something - Colin McCahon's Storm Warning -- The public interest - an annotated bibliography.

Knox Chrysalis Seed collection.