A Game of Two Halves

The Best of Sport 2005–2019

Fergus Barrowman

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781776564651
• Edition: 0

Sport was conceived in the back of Damien Wilkins' yellow Ford Escort – he tells the story in the introduction to  Great Sporting Moments – and born in spring 1988.  A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019 chronicles the second half of Aotearoa New Zealand's most exciting literary magazine's life. 'It wasn't going to have a manifesto,' founding editor Fergus Barrowman remembers. 'It was clear to all of us that experimental writing – or postmodern writing, call it what you like – was just as rulebound as literary realism, and no more likely to be any good; that experienced writers took as many risks as beginning writers; and that older beginning writers – Barbara Anderson! – were just as alive in the moment of self-discovery as young writers.' This book looks back through the fifteen issues of  Sport from 2005 to 2019. In 600 pages it presents fiction, poetry, essays and oddities by 100 of our best writers, from leading lights like Bill Manhire, Ashleigh Young and Elizabeth Knox, to emerging glow worms like Tayi Tibble, Ruby Solly and Eamonn Marra.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Kiss
• Andy—don’t keep your distance
• Daughter
• from Getting There: An Autobiography
• White Saris
• Idiots
• Summer’s Necrologue
• Hungry
• The details of her nightmares
• Christmas Morning
• Robin Dudding 1935–2008
• Self-portrait 4
• Bug Week
• A nice night
• I’ll never get a poem from this neighbourhood
• Oh, Abraham Lincoln, kiss me harder
• Medical
• It Has Been a Long Time Since I Last Spoke To You, So Here I Am
• Broken
• Jeff Mangum
• What the very old man told me
• The Pitfalls of Poetry
• Fifth Grade Time Capsule
• Thought Horses
• ‘All my feelings would have been of common things’
• Late to my appointment
• Snow White’s Coffin
• Descent from Avalanche
• The Last of Bashō
• The Great Wall Café
• from The Cowboy Dog
• To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
• How to live by the sea
• Haiku
• Kissing Terry in the Rain
• Letter
• A Lonely Road
• Youth
• Woolshed Blues
• Wake
• After Reading an Anthology
• Early
• Really & Truly
• Glass glitters better than diamond under such splintered light
• The Owners
• The Pests
• Sweet on the Comedown
• The Garage Party
• hot bodies
• The Otorhinolaryngologist
• Saudade
• Flood
• The Inertia Poem
• Tata Beach, New Year’s Eve, 1974
• Fair Copy
• Tentatively Joined
• Bonsense
• Artificial Intelligence
• 穷人店，富人店
• An Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman walk into a Pā
• From an Imaginary Notebook
• The Schoolbus
• The question poem
• Dog Farm, Food Game
• Clean hands save lives
• The Harmonious Development of Man
• Fatigue
• Rope
• Sex dream
• First
• How Far from Earth
• Pain
• The Gold Day Has Dimmed
• Unlove
• Rotational Head Injury
• I love you?
• Early morning on the Sand-walk, Down House, March 1857
• When in Rome
• In Search of X
• The Road to Tokomairiro
• Song of la chouette
• cough in
• The Life and Deaths of Adeline Snow
• Noddy
• Pool Noodle
• A new body
• Sisters
• when the barber talks about elephants
• I Am a Man of Many Professions, My Wife Is a Lady of Many Confessions
• Cicada Motel
• no horse
• Six Feet for a Single, Eight for a Double
• Real life
• Leaves
• Brothers Blind
• Kuki the Krazy Kea
• Diary of a (L)it Girl or, Frankenstein’s Ghost Pig
• Badly written men
• Mount Eden
• Infernally yours, gentleman poet in the streets—raging homosexual in the sheets
• Department of Immigration
• New transgender blockbusters
• Asylum Notes
• Haunted sestina
• The feijoas are falling from the trees
• The World of Children’s Books
• Memoir, with Electrodes
• I’m out for dead presidents to represent me
• to the kreisau dogs
• postscript to the kreisau dogs
• Arthritis the elephant
• She cannot work
• Editors on the Storm
• Hokusai on the Shore
• Contributors’ Notes & Acknowledgements