Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Individual and the Communal

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Jordan Hamel

Ghosts by Siobhan Harvey (Otago University Press, 2021), 112pp., $27.50; Five O’Clock Shadows by Richard Langston (Cuba Press, 2020), 48pp., $25; Fancy Dancing: New and selected poems 2004–2020 by Bernadette Hall (Victoria University Press, 2020), 128pp., $30

The one we’re forced to repeat: here is the story

They create and rewrite

into poems such as this

The prologue ‘Night, a Place of Regeneration’ builds the architecture for Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection, Ghosts. The writing and rewriting of the same story, the story of movement, of migration, of memory, of home, of the individual and communal, all of which become ghosts that constantly regenerate through the book.

So much of this collection unpacks what it means to haunt and be haunted, what experiences and trauma we give voice and a soul to, what our history owes us, and how that history sits within a life that is not just ours.  [Read more…]

Stories to Outlive Us

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Emma Espiner 

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface by Jacinta Ruru & Linda Waimarie Nikora (eds) (Otago University Press, 2021), 340pp., $60

Ngā Kete Mātauranga, a collection of stories from twenty-four leading Māori researchers, creates a virtual community for tauira, academics and whānau to experience whakawhanaungatanga with a constellation of scholars who speak to us in their own words. Edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora, this repository of knowledge is the result of a partnership initiative between Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga and the Royal Society Te Apārangi and was published this year by the Otago University Press.

It is moving to encounter so many Māori researchers in one place. Indigenous scholars are thinly spread, often isolated in institutions with little support or recognition, and the contributors to this book relate their personal experience of this lonely reality. In the kōrero whakamutunga which closes the book, the editors remark: ‘We would confidently guess that most university departments today employ maybe one fully tenured Māori academic staff member at best.’ We know from the published work of researchers Tara McAllister, Sereana Naepi, Joanna Kidman, Reremoana Theodore and Olivia Rowley that Māori make up only five percent of academics in our universities.  [Read more…]

Fish out of water

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Wendy Parkins

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane (Victoria University Press, 2020), 218 pp., $30; Victory Park by Rachel Kerr (Mākaro Press, 2020), 246 pp, $35

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane and Victory Park by Rachel Kerr are both debut novels longlisted in this year’s Ockham awards (Victory Park went on to win the prize for best first novel), but this is not the only thing these books have in common. They are both also about women living precariously.

Erin, the protagonist of The Swimmers, is a postgraduate student in Auckland working part time in an art gallery. Her tenuous hold on things is not due simply to limited employment prospects, nor to her tendency to self-sabotage—perhaps best represented by her dubious relationship choices. Lane’s novel deftly describes the existential uncertainties and mis-steps of early adulthood more generally, when the strong pull towards freedom and independence strains against the emotional bonds—and baggage—connecting us to our family of origin. [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

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Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

‘The worst thing you can ever do’

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Sally Blundell 

Loss Adjustment by Linda Collins (Awa Press, 2020), 300pp., $40

‘I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you,’ writes 17-year-old Victoria. ‘Killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.’

Fifteen days later, and six pages into Loss Adjustment, that okay-ness shatters what should have been just another school day, when New Zealand journalist Linda Collins and her partner, photographer Malcolm McLeod, are driven the short distance from their Singapore apartment to find their daughter lying broken and lifeless on a concrete-tiled path. 

Their world stops; their lives slam into a wall of confusion, despair, irresolvable grief.  [Read more…]