Gorse Blooms Pale: Dan Davin’s Southland Stories

Dan Davin, Rhodes scholar, for many years Academic Publisher at the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and one of New Zealand’s acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1914. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in Southland. Comic, haunting, poetic, profound and lyrical, the stories have a regional flavour quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of an idiosyncratic rural community, its post-British social relationships and tribulations, with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton or Marshall. When The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.