Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Gender Magpie

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Chris Brickell

I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika by Sharon Mazer, with a foreword by Witi Ihimaera (Auckland University Press, 2018), 288 pp., $59.99

It all began in Timaru. Neil Gudsell, who later transformed himself into the drag artist, activist and performer Mika, started his life in the provincial South Island town. A Māori child adopted by Pākehā parents, he had to ride the ‘swings and roundabouts of identity’ in a not-always bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand. As a ‘reflexively daring’ child he invented a sense of himself through performance. I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika is a lively tale of all of these things: biculturalism and the everyday expectations and politics that surround it; self-fashioning; enactments of culture, gender and sexuality; and a society that has changed – mostly a lot, although not wholly – since Mika’s birth in 1962. Biographer Sharon Mazer provocatively suggests that Mika’s life offers a useful perspective on the liberations and repressions of the 1960s, the slowly waning homophobia of the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s. Mika’s awakenings tell of broader patterns of social change. [Read more…]

Elemental Awareness

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Laurence Fearnley 

Dark Forest, Deep Sea: Reflections of a hunter by Richard Hall (Submarine, 2017), 250 pp., $38; Oxygen by William Trubridge (HarperCollins, 2017) 336 pp., $39.99

Every now and again you open a book, begin reading and relax as you realise that you have found the perfect fit for your mood. This is what happened to me when I began Richard Hall’s Dark Forest, Deep Sea: Reflections of a hunter. I hadn’t known that I wanted to read a book about hunting, but the depth of Hall’s detailed observation immediately struck a chord. The opening paragraph begins with a description of the scent of his felted wool hunting jersey:

Laced within was the scent of beech forest from the mountains of New Zealand – aromatic like cinnamon, but mixed with a volatile component reminiscent of eucalypt – a scent so crisp it struck all other thoughts from my mind. Then another layer – earthy, like wet fistfuls of crumbling humus fresh from the forest floor. The subtle musk of deer from past hunts lingered, not unpleasant, distinctly animal. My head spun and I was taken straight into a memory of the Southern Alps, far from the wooden panels of my shed on the rim of Wellington Harbour.

Immense snow-capped mountains rose up around me, valleys clad with thousands of acres of dark green forest, braided rivers flowing through golden tussocks. A rifle lay across my lap and my dog, Jack, leaned against me, our prints dotted out behind us in the dew. Breath condensed in puffs, wafting up like smoke. I pulled the jersey away, returning to reality, and stood over my pack with the garment hanging loosely from my hands. The vision left me, but the feelings did not. Feelings of enchantment, contentment, wonder, longing. [Read more…]

Everything is Turning to Sound

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Majella Cullinane

Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine, 2018), 280 pp., $35

A passion for music, and its ability to connect the most dissimilar of women, Eva McAlester and Grace Coles, lies at the heart of the novel Gone to Pegasus. Divided into four parts that correspond to musical tempos, the story is set in February 1892, and from the outset provides the reader with vivid, engaging evocations of place: Dunedin, New Delhi and Lake Wakatipu.

The novel opens in Dunedin, and we follow twenty-year-old Eva as she leaves her house on Pitt Street, walks past Knox Church, through the Octagon and on to Princes Street. Eva is about to audition for a part in a choir, and as she passes three men playing Vivaldi she is reminded that her husband has been incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. [Read more…]

The Importance of Rivers

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Graeme Wynn

The Waikato: A history of New Zealand’s greatest river by Paul Moon (Atuanui Press, 2018), 456 pp., $69.99; New Zealand’s Rivers: An environmental history by Catherine Knight (University of Canterbury Press, 2016), 324 pp., $49.99

‘Rivers compel attention and invite stories.’ These words open an intriguing doctoral dissertation completed in 1999 in the Department of English in the University of British Columbia by New Zealander Charles Dawson.1 They introduce a twisting, tumbling, rippling, glinting, eddying and surging torrent of ideas and observations that washes over an impressively varied array of personal essays, novels and poetry, brushes the banks of theory, and entrains contemporary anxieties along the way. Most of the authors Dawson considers engage, as he does, in ‘river reflection’ – a ‘process of articulation, born of contemplation and engagement with mental and physical streams’. Their physical streams are almost entirely North American, but their articulations emphasise interconnections through memory and myth, ecology and community, damage and loss, to produce particular ways of seeing and understanding.  [Read more…]

Gardens and Gloom

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Emer Lyons

This Joyous, Chaotic Place: Garden poems by Heather McPherson (Spiral, 2018), 88 pp., $25; Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon by Anna Jackson (Seraph Press, 2018), 24 pp., $20; Last Stop Before Insomnia/Dernier Arrêt Avant l’Insomnie by Marlène Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier (Seraph Press, 2018) 40 pp., £20

Heather McPherson was the first out lesbian published in New Zealand with A Figurehead: A face (Spiral), which appeared in 1982. Her ground-breaking role is something I cherish and consciously bring to my reading of This Joyous, Chaotic Place, McPherson’s posthumously published fifth collection. All the poems here have been carefully edited by Janet Charman, Lynne Ciochetto and Marian Evans, who formed a new Spiral collective to fulfil the request McPherson made before she died, that Charman edit what she called ‘the garden poems’.  [Read more…]