Stonefish

Description

Title: Stonefish
Author: Keri Hulme
Publisher: Huia Publishers, Wellington, 2004
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good — slight signs of outer wear. Small neat inscription on inner page. Never read.

Description:

A stonefish is two things at once. It is a venomous fish, camouflaged and lethal. And in Māori narrative, it is pounamu — greenstone — that swam to the West Coast of the South Island in the form of a fish. Dangerous and precious. That duality is the key to this book.

Stonefish is Keri Hulme’s second collection of short fiction and poetry, published in 2004 after a twenty-year public silence following the bone people. It arrived as what the NZ Herald called “a recognisable Hulme ring” — isolated narrators, Māori mythology braided with Celtic and Norse threads, a coastal South Island world that sits at the edge of the knowable, the boundary between the human and whatever is older and stranger than us. Poems, stories, and pieces that resist easy categorisation: food that might eat you back, a woman who blows up obelisks on picnics, the eyes of the moonfish, a world quietly drowning. The writing is, as one academic reviewer put it, “the work of a writer of mature craft, varied experience of life, and with a clear vision.”

Huia Publishers — a Māori publishing house — produced this single edition. It was never reprinted.

Hulme built her own octagonal house at Okarito on the West Coast in 1973 and lived there for most of the rest of her life, writing and fishing and holding the Okarito Free Republic flag from her flagpole. She died in December 2021, aged 74. Her nephew said her greatest gift to the family was reconnecting them with their whakapapa Māori and their Kai Tahu roots. That is the spirit this collection comes from.

Why We Stock It:

Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize in 1985 with the bone people — the first New Zealander to do so, and the first writer to win with a debut novel. Copies of everything she published are becoming harder to find. This one, in a single edition from a small press, is harder than most. A copy in good condition is worth picking up.