Crowdfunding for a tremendous book: Crete 1941
We need your help: Tuwhiri’s next book will be a 34,000 word epic poem, ‘Crete 1941’ by Bernard Cadogan. You can help us bring this book to life. Please read on.
August 2021
Aotearoa New Zealand’s epic of nationhood, and of Māori citizenship attained by the valour and sacrifices of the 28th (Māori) Battalion, Crete 1941 is also the epic of the Cretan resistance to the German occupation of Crete.
Presenting the extraordinary extent which indigenous citizenship, such as Māori possess, contributes to the personality of a country, it tells a story that Greeks and New Zealanders need to recover for themselves from the myths created by British writers around the Battle of Crete.
When you support our crowdfunding appeal you can get early bird pricing for single copies, quantities of books for your community, and even get signed copies. You can also get your name – or that of your hapu, iwi, organisation or business – in the book and on the Tuwhiri website as a sponsor.
Download an excerpt and support the production of Crete 1941 here:
https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/6988-crete-1941-an-epic-poem
About Crete 1941
Australia has ‘The Great South Land’, South Africa has ‘Shaka Zulu’, Argentina has the gaucho epic ‘Martin Fierro’, and Chile has ‘La Araucana’ as its national poem. Now, Aotearoa New Zealand has Crete 1941, an epic poem about the New Zealand-led defence of Crete during the Battle of Crete between 20 May and 1 June 1941.
Crete 1941 is the only epic long poem in English since Derek Walcott’s ‘Omeros’, with the entry of the 28th (Māori) Battalion as an active combat force providing the culmination of the poem. As geopolitical tensions rise in the Pacific today, it’s timely to look back to when New Zealand last went to war and defended another small nation – Greece – on its last redoubt, in a battle that ended in a Dunkirk-style evacuation.
More than just a war story, Crete 1941 brings women back into the historic struggle for Crete. The poem is a life-changing reflection on the virtue of good small nations, on the contribution of indigenous peoples such as Māori and Cretans to international developments, and on the fragility that both peace and its disruptors share.
‘In no way glorifying the violence of the Greek campaign and the battle of Crete,’ said poet Bernard Cadogan, ‘this epic places conflict right at the heart of our desire for peace, as well as our capacity to reason, will and love. Unlike other “war stories”, women are central to this poem, never absent.’
He asks: ‘Why did New Zealanders fight for the oldest site of a European palace state: the site of the myth of the labyrinth and Minotaur? What was the monster in the palace that we fought? What other ways are there of dealing with such a menace?’
‘This is a radical poem, not a fuddy-duddy poem,’ said Cadogan. ‘It is not composed in Spenserian stanzas as a conservative nostalgia trip or whimsy, but as a deliberate act of decolonisation and reparation for Edmund Spenser and our own premier Alfred Domett’s dreadfully racist “Ranolf and Amohia”.’
‘Crete 1941 does this in the spirit of Wu Ming’s New Italian Epic, inverting Ferrara, Cork, colonial Wellington.… Someone has said Crete 1941 has put intellect and heart back into New Zealand verse; in a way this is true.’
Download an excerpt and support the production of Crete 1941 here:
https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/6988-crete-1941-an-epic-poem
NOW for our other news…
Online Reading group for What is this?
Timed to be suitable for people in Canada / The USA / The Caribbean and Central and South America, this group will work their way through the book together. The first meeting is likely to take place in the middle of September.
For more information and to register send us an email.
Revamp in Thai
We’re helping a Bangkok publisher produce a Thai language version of Winton Higgins’s recent book Revamp, writings on secular Buddhism. If you’ve found that this book has helped you develop your understanding of the dharma, just imagine how it might also be useful to people in Thailand.
It’ll have a new title in Thai – Seeing the dharma in a new perspective. So far we’ve received NZD 616 (approx USD 434) towards the USD 5000 needed to translate this book, check it, typeset it, print it, and promote it.
If you’d like to make a donation to help bring this book to life in Thai, or you want to find out more, take at look at:
Revamp launch videos now available
Four events took place with different time zones in mind to launch Revamp. Author Winton Higgins spoke and took questions in all of them, and they really were all very different.
To watch one more of these sessions go to:
An afterthought … not really
A page is being developed on the Tuwhiri website for Crete 1941 here:
THE TUWHIRI PROJECT
FINDING MEANING IN A DIFFICULT WORLD
Kati ake nei, ka kite ano
Ramey Margolis • Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
for The Tuwhiri Project