Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Ko Wai Tātou?

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Ben Brown

The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, 2019), 336 pp., $30

It seems to me that, when you break it down, in the final analysis every story ever told is all about identity. Take this book review for example: starting out with the best of intentions but somewhere along the line, you just wait and see. From McCahon’s I Am to Disneyland, the question is always ‘Ko wai ahau? Who am I?’

Well, guess what. Ko wai koe. Literally, ‘You are water.’

It’s all in the wai. You see that don’t you? Of course you do.

But more than that, this sweet little double entendre underscores the essential precept of tikanga, of the way things are. Tikanga says that we are inseparable from te ao, the physical world of life and light. The Burning River I think suggests that we are inseparable from each other, even when we don’t know it. [Read more…]

Hear Here

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Claire Lacey

Listening In by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2019), 74 pp., $27.50; AUP New Poets 5 by Carolyn DeCarlo, Rebecca Hawkes and Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press, 2020), 114 pp., $29.99

Lynley Edmeades’ second poetry collection, Listening In, is a celebration of poetic craft. Edmeades plays with the multiplicity of language in contemporary daily life, and the poetry is so rich and layered that I found it difficult to write a concise review. There are references to diverse literary influences, including a twelfth-century French troubadour and the poets John Ashbery, Caroline Bergvall and David Eggleton. Poems about personal domesticity sit alongside others about the pervasive discourse of politics. Translations and ‘un-translations’ are peppered through the book. At its heart, this collection is about language itself: how the words we use are slippery and meaning is always contingent on context. [Read more…]

Mate atu he toa, ara mai ra he toa! When one warrior dies, another arises to take his place!

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Vaughan Rapatahana

Whitiki! Whiti! Whiti! E!: Māori in the First World War by Monty Soutar (Bateman Books, 2019), 576 pp., $69.99 

He pukapuka tino nui tēnei. This is a very big book. Nearly 600 pages, a weight of 3kg and measurements of 286 x 210mm. You would need a lectern to hold it up for sustained periods of reading! The rest of the time it relaxes well on any coffee table.

He pukapuka tino pai tēnei. This is a very good book. Well presented, with dozens of maps and diagrams and hundreds of photographs, including many of the servicemen involved, a generous quotient of whom were Pasifika volunteers. It is also important to note that several toa wāhine volunteered to fight and were not happy about being declined. As Soutar says, ‘Given the Māori tradition that women accompanied their men to war, it was not surprising that women showed disdain for the military’s enlistment criteria’ (47).  [Read more…]

The Culture of Concealment

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Lynn Jenner

Chosen Boys by Petra Molloy (Escalator Press, 2019), 340 pp., $30

In the author’s words, Chosen Boys ‘deals with the sexual abuse of a seven-year-old and the effects on him, his family and community. It’s about the culture of concealment in the Church. It’s also about the resilience of a people, when their lives are being destroyed by the betrayal of the Church in whom they trusted.’1

Jack, the boy in question, is abused by Father Bane, whose name is an old English word meaning scourge, ruin, death, plague or destruction, a poison that causes death. (This language play is a typical Molloy touch.) It is made plain in Chosen Boys that there are many layers of concealment in the lead-up to the abuse, and that other abused boys exist in each place this priest has lived.  [Read more…]

Creatures of the Mind

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Elizabeth Morton

Craven by Jane Arthur (Victoria University Press, 2019), 88 pp., $25; The Track by Paula Green (Seraph Press, 2019), 64 pp, $25; At This Distance by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press, 2019 ), 88 pp., $27.50

Craven by Jane Arthur feels effortless, unfiltered – it displays the raw motions of the limbic system, untroubled by social mores or poetic constraints. It is the over-sharer at the party – but one who is artful, engaging. It is the deep-and-meaningful quasi-confessional anecdote told over a punch bowl that commits you to feeling more flawed but also as if you are more of a participant in the human race. Eileen Myles, American poet and judge of the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (which Arthur won), said of Arthur’s poems, ‘they don’t have to try so hard’. There is an ease to their pared back conversational honesty. [Read more…]