Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Decade That Never Dies

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David Eggleton

Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s by Murray Edmond (Atuanui Press, 2021), 360pp, $38

My father, who served on the Hamilton City Council, told me Council had two rules: the first, ‘Spend No Money’ and the second, if you really had to spend money, ‘Give the Job to your Mates.’

Murray Edmond’s cultural history Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, crammed full of anecdotes like the above, is really a story of two decades. It charts the seismic shift in New Zealand from the monoculturalism, conformism and emotional repression of the 1950s to the participatory happenings, internationalism and upbeat optimism of the late 1960s. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. [Read more…]

Ghosts

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Philip Temple

The Little Ache – a German notebook by Ian Wedde (Victoria University Press, 2021), 144pp., $30; All Tito’s Children by Tim Grgec (Victoria University Press, 2021), 96pp., $25

In these two volumes of poetry, Ian Wedde and Tim Grgec search for ancestors and ancestral meaning in European lands torn and shadowed by tribal conflicts and deadly authoritarian solutions. Both books are timely when we hear almost daily of the importance of whakapapa. They are fine reminders that, although ancestry here may be decadally recent, tūpuna live in wairua, in both meanings of the word, no matter how distant or ancient its roots. [Read more…]

Looping Back to the Past

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Tina Shaw

Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, 2021), 336pp, $35

Attending a Catholic girls’ high school during the 70s, I vividly remember the shame, scurrilous gossip and fascination surrounding teen pregnancy. One girl in my year left school at sixteen because she was pregnant. There were whispers about girls ‘going to Sydney’ or being sent down country to stay with relatives and have the baby—in effect, exiled. The opening section of Sue Orr’s latest novel Loop Tracks captures this aspect of the times. [Read more…]

At the Edge of Storytelling

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Vaughan Rapatahana

I Wish, I Wish by Zirk van den Berg (Cuba Press Novella Series, 2020), 173pp, $25; Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson, and other very short stories by Jack Remiel Cottrell (Canterbury University Press, 2021), 136pp, $29.99

Two interesting and arresting books. The first is a short novel, a work of fantastic fiction; the second is a series of short, short genre-benders, a work of sometimes frightening fabulousness. Both are very well written, compact in construction and content, and compelling.

I Wish, I Wish is a cleverly written novella which is bodacious reading—swift to complete, simple to solve. The kaupapa or theme is rather unusual. A nondescript nonentity of an undertaker, Seb, earns himself three wishes because of his own kind act towards a fading yet angelic child, Gabriel, who visits the bankrupting mortuary where Seb performs the brunt of the work, and who somewhat miraculously reconstructs a seemingly unsalvageable Rubik’s Cube. [Read more…]

Artist-Writers Gift Their Sight

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Angela Trolove

A Bathful of Kawakawa and Hot Water by Hana Pera Aoake (Compound Press, 2020), 88pp, $25; Piripai by Leila Lees (99% Press, an imprint of Lasavia Publishing, 2021), 108pp, $25; Party Legend by Sam Duckor-Jones (Victoria University Press, 2021), 96pp, $25

If you did not know that Hana Pera Aoake, Sam Duckor-Jones and Leila Lees are practising artists as well as writers, you’d sense it in the way they each write their books. Here we have three writers who juxtapose trivia with life-and-death matters, resulting in engaging collections. Aoake works with textiles and natural materials, Duckor-Jones sculpts and Lees paints—and their writing is imagistic. Colours and textures are precise, and they prioritise experimentation. Just flip to any page of Party Legend. Or see how Aoake brings together poems, social theory, an all caps-lock piece and a paragraph written exclusively in questions. And observe how Lees experiments with anonymity—subjects are referred to simply as the girl, the man, etc. But let’s start with Aoake. [Read more…]

Poignancy and Necessity: Posthumous poetry

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

Siobhan Harvey

No Traveller Returns by Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020), 104pp, $27.50; Wanting to Tell You Everything by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr (Caselberg Press, 2020), 66pp, $25; The Needles of the Marram Grass by W.S. Broughton (SwampThing, 2019), 130pp, $25

The ease with which we forget or cast aside writers after their deaths, particularly those identifying as women, non-Pākehā and non-hetero-normative, is a problem with a long history. For centuries, authors around the world and their bodies of work have been lost to subsequent generations.

No Traveller Returns by Ruth France, Wanting to Tell You Everything by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr and The Needles of the Marram Grass by W.S. Broughton are three posthumously published New Zealand collections. The poetry within their covers illustrates the way that powerful work endures beyond an author’s passing. These books are potential prompts to us to rethink how we save and savour contemporary literature so that future generations have access to it. [Read more…]