Landfall Review Online

A Vocal Wiri

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Karyn Paringatai

Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori women poets in translation, edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis (Seraph Press, 2018), 40 pp., $20

He tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu. He tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa.
The starry hosts of heaven abide there for ever. The hosts of humans on earth pass away into oblivion.

tātai whetū: 1. (noun) constellation, cluster of stars

The ‘stars’ of Tātai Whetū, a collection of seven poems by seven Māori women poets, take the reader on a wistful journey that traverses the boundaries of the spiritual and physical realms. The poets who composed these poems will inevitably pass on from this physical world – he tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa – but their words and thoughts are hung in the metaphysical space of the heavens above as guiding lights never to be extinguished – he tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu.

A highly charged current of feminine strength underlies the poems in this collection. Māori history is rich with narratives featuring strong female figures who defy the odds and are a powerful force to be reckoned with: ‘I heard their karanga, the dawn voice, centuries of women rising up in a vocal wiri from the motu …’ Anahera Gildea reminds us that we are a continuation of those who have gone before us and our karanga will add to the resounding echoes of quivering voices that will be heard for generations to come. [Read more…]

Anxieties of Influence, Impermanence

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Genevieve Scanlan

A Field Officer’s Notebook by Dan Davin (Cold Hub Press, 2018), 104 pp., $29.95; Murmurations by Art Nahill (Two Hemispheres Poetry, 2018) 68 pp., $27; How to Defeat the Philistines by David Beach (David Beach, 2018), 64 pp., $25; Crisis & Duplication by David Merritt (Compound Press, 2017), 22 pp., $20

‘If I ever get round to making sense of the preceding,’ wrote Dan Davin before his death, ‘I’ll call it Field Officer’s Notebook.’ Editor Robert McLean has honoured this intention, making sense and order of a lifetime’s work in this posthumously published collection. McLean’s introduction provides valuable context, describing the three stages of life in which Davin’s poetry was written: while at university, while serving in World War Two, and during his later years in England. And though the introduction self-consciously admits that some of Davin’s work might now seem dated, the depth of feeling evoked in these poems spans the decades easily.

These are poems heavy with the weight of disillusionment – even those written long before Davin had seen the horrors of war. ‘Perspective’ captures that disenchantment that is keenest-felt when fresh, in adolescence: ‘My father was a hero once. / Now he is a man. / The world shrinks from infinity / To a finger’s span.’ A few pages on comes a lament for wasted talent: ‘In what diversity of sterile tasks / Have I diffused my power, that these full years / Have built no monument of mine.’ If the language and style here are period-specific, the feeling is surely near-universal. [Read more…]

The Ground Zero of Change

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Chris Else

Confessions of a Cockroach and Headstone: two novellas by Mike Johnson (99% Press, 2017) 180 pp., $29.95

‘Mike Johnson is the most underrated of all living New Zealand authors.’ So said Iain Sharp in a Sunday Star-Times review of Johnson’s The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He. There is substance to Sharp’s claim. Johnson has published nine works of longer fiction, two collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, a medical memoir and a children’s book. Despite critical attention and recognition from awards and dispensers of fellowships, in a career spanning over thirty years he has never managed to retain a mainstream publisher and has had only fleeting recognition from readers and reviewers. The reason for this, it seems to me, lies as much in the literary context as in Johnson’s creative predilections.

For the most part, New Zealand’s literary taste still has a preference for realism. Or, to put this point in commercial terms, the small overall size of the New Zealand market means that the sectors of that market that are keen on non-realistic modes – fantasy, say, or science fiction – are too small to sustain local publishing programmes. As a major local publisher said to me recently, ‘Dystopian doesn’t sell, fantasy doesn’t sell, magic realism doesn’t sell, ghost stories don’t sell.’ Even crime seems to be marginal. No doubt there is an element of cultural cringe in this situation. Local writers of fantasy are competing in a global market, and a New Zealand fan is more likely to look to one of the big overseas publishers than to seek satisfaction in the local scene. [Read more…]

Our Polyglot Contemporary

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Janet M. Wilson

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 754 pp., £175; Volume 4, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including miscellaneous works, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 500 pp., £175

These two handsome volumes are successors to the collected fiction, volumes 1 and 2 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, co-edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, who, in making available all Mansfield’s creative work, aimed at a remapping that would show her ‘rare originality’. The variety of short stories, sketches, vignettes and dialogues displayed in the collected fiction is amply complemented by the range of nonfiction presented in these volumes: Mansfield’s poetry and critical writings in volume 3, and her diaries and miscellaneous works in volume 4. Most of Mansfield’s non-fictional writings have been published in various editions since her death, many poorly edited by John Middleton Murry. The new volumes feature much newly discovered work presented with up-to-date scholarship and ample textual annotation. Volume 4 publishes Mansfield’s diaries in a chronological order, by contrast to Margaret Scott’s 1997 The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. By bringing together the non-fiction as a greatly expanded corpus, the editors display as never before Mansfield’s multiple talents as diarist and journal writer, translator, poet, reviewer and essayist, and producer of parodies, pastiches and aphorisms.

The gargantuan, 750-page volume 3 consists of almost all the nonfiction that Mansfield ever wrote (apart from her personal writing), and opens with 179 poems, almost double the number collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1988 edition. Many new poems are recent discoveries made by Kimber in the Alexander Turnbull Library, including 19 poems in a notebook titled ‘Little Fronds’, written when Mansfield was at Queen’s College, London, dedicated to ‘Ake, Ake Aroha’ and signed ‘Kathleen M. Beauchamp’. Volume 4 contains Kimber’s most recent discovery, made in the Newberry Library – too late to be included in volume 3 – of the treasure trove of poems entitled ‘The Earth Child’ (1910), a cycle of 35 poems that Mansfield hoped would be published in 1910, which shows her, the editors claim, ‘at the height of her poetic powers’. Only nine of the poems have been previously published, and the entire sequence is reproduced in the section ‘Miscellany’. Despite the slightness and unevenness of this apprentice work, mostly written before Mansfield left for London in 1908, it offers glimpses of what was to come. [Read more…]