This ambitious literary study undertakes to discuss all of the work of New Zealand's most prolific and versatile man of letters.
In her previous book of literary criticism, Plume of Bees: a literary biography of C. K. Stead, Judith Dell Panny met the challenges offered by the work of another versatile and productive senior man of letters by fashioning the study as a narrative ''literary biography'', with the emphasis on ''literary'': the works were discussed in chronological order and the central narrative concern was not so much the life of the author as the shape of his literary career, especially in his relation to his reading public.
O`Sullivan's immensely varied and complex literary career offers no clear, dramatic narrative shape such as that of the often controversial Stead, and involves his working in an immense range of genres at irregular intervals.
Panny's organisational strategy was to arrange separately O'Sullivan's work in each genre: a chapter on the libretti; three on the poetry; two on the short stories; two on the novels; two on the plays; one on the biography of John Mulgan; two on the editions, anthologies, and literary criticism and other essays - bookended by a brief introduction and conclusion.
Her answer to the range of genres was to include four chapters by other critics (three of them from the 2007 festschrift for O'Sullivan, Still shines when you think of it).
The 15 chapters employ a number of different approaches to different genres, all contributing to form a much-needed overview of O'Sullivan's richly varied work.
With the poetry, Panny first selects 17 representative shorter poems from the more than 1000 published between 1963 and 2015, providing the text and a close reading for each; then Peter Whiteford focuses on the picture of Pontius Pilate emerging from the title sequence of O'Sullivan's 1986 collection, The Pilate Tapes; finally Panny provides texts and close readings of a variety of poems portraying ''humankind'' from O'Sullivan's award-winning collection of 2013, Us, then.
With the short fiction she first discusses representative stories from the first six collections (1978-2006) under mostly thematic headings, showing how O'Sullivan presents realistic pictures of ''human foibles and contradictory social values'', prompting us ''to laugh, reminisce, reconsider''; then she focuses on the treatment of different aspects of social class in the stories of The Families (2014).
With the two major novels she discusses time and duration in the award-winning Let the River Stand (1993), while Paul Millar analyses the grotesque in Believers to the Bright Coast (1998).
Whiteford then demonstrates why the biography of Mulgan, Long journey to the border (2003), was considered by Michael King to be ''more powerful and more moving than anything else in our biographical literature''.
Success as poet, novelist, short story writer, biographer - that ought to be enough for any writer, but the book demonstrates that O'Sullivan has succeeded in many other roles.
Panny opens with the librettist, giving a detailed dramatic account of the first performance of Requiem for the Fallen in Wellington in 2014, and points to eight other collaborations with composer Ross Harris - two operas, an oratorio and five song cycles (2003-14).
She closes her run through O'Sullivan's successful roles with the omnibus category of ''editor, critic and essayist'', including more than 30 volumes and some uncollected essays.
The first of her two chapters on this huge body of work excludes the Katherine Mansfield material and discusses the anthologist of short stories and poetry, the editor of literary texts, and the critical and personal essayist; the second discusses his indispensable work on Mansfield including his co-editing of the Collected Fiction (with Gerri Kimber, 2012) and the Collected Letters ( with Margaret Scott, 1984-2008), and several critical essays and selections of stories, letters, and poems.
While O'Sullivan from the 1970s onward built up a reputation as a Mansfield scholar and received many invitations to deal with her work, for O'Sullivan the dramatist the environment was not so favourable, as Sebastian Black reveals in is chapter on the plays.
Black focuses on Billy (1989) as a successful play in which O'Sullivan ''found a series of dramatic techniques that allow him to express a flinty moral commitment inside of a drama of ideas, while avoiding didacticism'', a culmination of his work as dramatist during the ''exhilarating burst of theatrical activity'' in New Zealand in the 1980s; however, in the less lively New Zealand theatre since then, he summarises O'Sullivan as being ''one of the country's longest-lasting and most prolific playwrights, as well as a writer fascinated with what can be done on stage'', but one whose work ''has been almost as little discussed as staged'', with only a few professional productions of his work since 1990.
Panny in her chapter discusses Shuriken (1983) as a play still relevant to our cultural situation, one that ''in performance has the capacity to create a cathartic impact''.
Let the Writer Stand, in a short book, offers a view both of the variety and of the unity of O'Sullivan's work.
The underlying unity is implicit in the way that what Panny calls ''his consistent philosophy and beliefs''.
The reader comes away with a sense of a moral vision (summarised in the quotation from Peter Simpson about how O'Sullivan ''affirms certain moral and spiritual values, but also offers trenchant and pessimistic criticism of areas of our social life where those values are shown to be lacking''); at the same time the reader also gains a sense of how he uses irony, indirection and contrast, close attention to detail, and authorial distance to present that vision.
Most important, the reader comes away with a sense that this combination of constant vision with outstanding literary versatility has in his 50-year career made him a unique major figure in New Zealand literature.
• Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
