Sullivan, Robert
IN BRIEF
Robert Sullivan, Nga Puhi, is a poet and librarian. He has emerged as a significant Maori poet, publishing several collections and featuring in key anthologies. His writing explores dimensions of contemporary urban experience, including local racial and social issues. His writing has a postmodern feel, where history and mythology, individual and collective experience, become areas of refined focus. Sullivan’s work has won or been nominated for many awards and he is an editor of the online journal, Trout.
FROM THE oxford companion TO new zealand literature
Sullivan, Robert (1967– ), Nga Puhi, emerged as a distinctive Maori poet with his first collection, Jazz Waiata (1990). Piki Ake appeared in 1993. Sullivan then had a substantial entry in the first volume of Te Ao Marama, edited byWiti Ihimaera (1994).
He is a graduate of Auckland University, where he took the course in modern American poetry taught by Wystan Curnow, Michele Leggott and Roger Horrocks. The largest single influence on Sullivan is the New York poet Frank O'Hara. Like O'Hara, he alternates relaxed, conversational narratives of everyday events, including frequent allusions to the literary scene and to popular culture, with, in other poems, disjointed, free-associative verse, typographical experimentation, and wild bursts of verbal exuberance. His quieter poems about his whanau in Northland, such as the Tai Tokerau sequence, also display a debt to Baxter's Pig Island Letters and Jerusalem poetry.
Sullivan is a qualified librarian, currently working at Auckland University Library. This bibliophile side of his life is explored in the sequence 'The George Grey Room', where he describes the daily routine of a rare books librarian, and praises the former New Zealand governor as a collector and benefactor, gently rebuking Maori activists who decapitated the statue of Grey in Albert Park. Sullivans predominantly urban, postmodern poetic is enriched by his acute awareness, as a Maori, of New Zealand racial and social issues. In works such as 'Not the 1990 Poem', 'Message from Mangere' and 'The Prophet Rua', he furnishes Maori identity with a new voice, sophisticated yet passionate.
KJ
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature,
edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998).
Additional Information
Robert Sullivan's collection of poetry, Star Waka (1999), was shortlisted in the 2000 Montana New Zealand Awards
Weaving Earth & Sky: Myths and Legends of Aotearoa by Robert Sullivan, with illustrations by Gavin Bishop, retells classic Maori myths and legends which range from creation to Maui to Kupes arrival in Aotearoa. Weaving Earth & Sky won the Non Fiction Category and Book of the Year in the New Zealand Post Childrens Book Awards 2003.
Weaving Earth & Sky: Myths and Legends of Aotearoa was shortlisted for the 2003 LIANZA Elsie Locke Medal.
Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) is a book-length poem. Originally commissioned as the libretto for a new work with composer John Psathas, this is a highly stylised, 'operatic' account of the voyages of Captain Cook.
Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) was longlisted in the Poetry Category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003.
Sullivan has been appointed as an Assistant Professor teaching Creative Writing at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. He took up the position in August 2003.
Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Auckland University Press, 2003) edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan is the first anthology of contemporary indigenous Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians. It won the reference and anthology category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004.
Sullivan's latest poetry collection is Voice Carried My Family (Auckland University Press, 2005).
In 2005 Robert Sullivan’s collection Pike Ake, long out of print, was published online in its entirety: www.trout.auckland.ac.nz
Media links and clips
- Robert Sullivan’s bibliography in the Auckland University Library's New Zealand Literature File
- Robert Sullivan's page on the Auckland University Press site
