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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Liminal States

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Iona Winter

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia, 2021), 350pp, $35

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui, Pākehā) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML. A screenwriter, novelist, playwright, barrister and solicitor, she has been shortlisted and won awards for both her scriptwriting and her three novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice (2010), Bugs (2013) and Legacy (2018). And now we have Kurangaituku, shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2022. E hika, this wahine is consistent! In addition, I think it’s fair to say (and widely publicised) that Hereaka is also a whizz at creating captivating bird-woman attire for book launches. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, maori and pacific, Uncategorized

Bowled Basilisk, Caught Agdistis

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean 

tumble by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press, 2021), 85pp, $27.50; Reading the Signs by Janis Freegard (The Cuba Press, 2020), 96pp, $25; Slips: Cricket poems by Mark Pirie (Headworx, 2021), 145pp, $30.

‘Female, nude’, the opening poem of Joanna Preston’s sophomore collection tumble, makes itself known with steely assuredness: 

The things we prize. Innocence,
the sleeping fire that speaks

through the long white flower
of her spine, the curve

of her hips the rim of a slow
turning wheel

on which to break a man. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, poetry, Uncategorized

Turning in Time

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Rachel O’Connor

Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara (The Cuba Press, 2021), 291pp, $37; The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist by Trisha Hanifin (Cloud Ink Press, 2021), 259pp, $30

‘If I could turn back time,’ sang Cher in her 1989 smash hit. ‘If I could find a way,’ she says, she would unsay all the hurtful words that had brought a sad end to her relationship. We can’t, of course, take back ‘all those words that have hurt’. Mere mortals and insomniacs especially are condemned instead to endlessly revisit the mistakes of our own history, impotent to avoid or undo the damage done by our younger selves. But what if we could? Just how far would we be willing to go to alter the fabric of the past, and therefore the present and future, of ourselves and those we love?  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, sci fi fantasy

To Re-remember and Re-learn

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Rachel Smith

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2021), 256 pp, $35; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young (Otago University Press, 2021), 288pp, $60

Two very different books, one memoir and one non-fiction, The Forgotten Coast and Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate offer an invitation to look closely at the world we live in—to listen and learn, to understand and re-remember. 

The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:

What stories do your dead tell you? How do you see your past? [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, environment, memoir, natural history, social sciences

Sisyphus in Sāmoa

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Shana Chandra 

Both Feet in Paradise by Andy Southall (The Cuba Press, 2021), 350pp, $37

Andy Southall’s Both Feet in Paradise is a disorientating read, in turn travelogue, mystery and suspense thriller. But by the time we close the book’s covers, we realise that this disorientation is precisely the point. Divided into three sections, each named after a character within the novel and told from their perspective, it begins with Naomi, a young woman listlessly waiting for her parents to arrive at the airport. We never get to see them walk through the gates as Naomi’s narrative is truncated by Adam’s. We’re with Naomi drinking beers under the heaving fluorescent lights of a sterile airport bar, then we are plunged into the bright light of the tropical idyl of Sāmoa with Adam. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

Writing Decolonisation, Rewriting Sovereignty

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Emma Gattey

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 120pp, $14.99; Imagining Decolonisation by Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Rebecca Kiddle, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 184pp, $14.99

Until relatively recently, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) seemed like one of literary and academic Aotearoa’s best-kept secrets. Whether parsing the poetry of Robert Sullivan, tracing the genealogical and creative connections between Māori and Pacific peoples, reformulating methodologies for Indigenous biography, history and literary scholarship, or dissecting the alienation of not-quite-belonging in either the English Department or Māori Studies, she is some kind of genius. And then she was awarded a Marsden Fund grant, published Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, contributed a heartrending chapter to Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface (Otago University Press, 2021) and delivered the 2021 Michael King Memorial Lecture. Irrepressible. With the publication of this accessible BWB Text alongside her other projects, Te Punga Somerville will be recognised as an invaluable public intellectual for so-called ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific, reviews and essays

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Recent reviews

  • Liminal States
    Iona Winter on Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka.
  • Bowled Basilisk, Caught Agdistis
    Robert McLean on tumble by Joanna Preston; Reading the Signs by Janis Freegard; Slips: Cricket poems by Mark Pirie.
  • Turning in Time
    Rachel O’Connor on Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara; The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist by Trisha Hanifin.
  • To Re-remember and Re-learn
    Rachel Smith on The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw; Wai Pasifika: Indigenous ways in a changing climate by David Young.
  • Sisyphus in Sāmoa
    Shana Chandra on Both Feet in Paradise by Andy Southall.

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