Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Memoir as Eco-Farming Manifesto

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Janet Newman

This Farming Life: Five generations on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders (Allen & Unwin, 2020), 272pp, $36.99

Early each morning Tim Saunders magpies words and phrases from the notebook he carries around the farm for his poems, short stories and now a memoir, he told a Manawatū Writers’ Festival session at Feilding Library in September this year. Audience members seemed more interested in his farming than his writing process, however. ‘Is lambing over now?’ asked one. Ditto on Saunders’ August Radio New Zealand interview with Kim Hill. ‘Bollocks!’ responded one listener to his explanation that lambing starts in cold weather so that lambs are weaned onto spring grass to improve their health later on: ‘They lamb now so that we can have spring lamb on our table for Christmas.’ ‘Well,’ replied Saunders, ‘I think that might be one of the reasons for some people, but for me, I think more in terms of animal health myself.’ [Read more…]

On Memory, Grief and the Multitudinousness of Being

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Erik Kennedy

Every now and then I have another child by Diane Brown (Otago University Press, 2020), 164pp, $29.95; Unmooring by Bridget Auchmuty (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2020), 88pp, $24.99; I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland (Compound Press, 2020), 76pp, $20

If you’re familiar with Diane Brown’s previous book of poetic memoir, Taking My Mother to the Opera, well, imagine that knack for life-writing but applied to a psychological thriller in verse and you’ve got Every now and then I have another child. Over the course of 110 lyrics the protagonist, the writer and teacher Joanna Lodge, adopts a couple of phantom children, is haunted by the spectre of (possibly) a long-lost sister, is caught up in a murder investigation, and discovers what really happened to her mother, who walked out on the family when Joanna was ten. Reality and fantasy wind up thoroughly intermixed, bubbling away together like the lager and fizzy drink in a shandy. [Read more…]

The Politics of (In)Visibilities

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Robyn Maree Pickens

Sapphic Fragments: Imogen Taylor with essays by Milly Mitchell-Anyon and Joanne Drayton (Hocken Collections, 2020), 50pp, $35; Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton (Canterbury University Press, 2020), 200pp, $65

Sapphic Fragments is an intimate, provocative and critical publication that is in conversation with artist Imogen Taylor’s exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in Ōtepoti Dunedin in early 2020, and her eleven-month residency as the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. The Fellow’s publication is ever increasingly becoming an integral component of the residency ‘outcomes’, and Taylor’s is no exception. Slightly smaller than A4, with a soft card cover and a geometric-patterned, light gsm dust jacket, Sapphic Fragments, as an aesthetic object, sits partway between high-end artist’s workbook and Moleskine stationery. The considered intimacy of the book’s exterior is continued between the pages with the inclusion of iPhone photos taken either by Taylor or partner and architect Sue Hillery. This naming of Sue Hillery as Taylor’s partner is significant for several reasons that encompass Taylor, Hillery and contemporary lesbian/queer visibility while also reaching back into the past of Hodgkins (1869–1947) and her ‘friend’ (lover), Dorothy K. Richmond. Sapphic Fragments can be interpreted as an act of reframing, repositioning and reclaiming elided intimate histories (personal and artistic), while agentially self-positioning Taylor (and Hillery) in an attempt to prevent present or future homophobic omissions. From design to photographs and text, the publication materialises the politics of queer intimacy, collaboration and reclamation. [Read more…]

The Irreducible Self

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Emma Gattey

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press, 2020), 232 pp, $30

Stepping into the world of Madison Hamill is a bit like stepping into the crazy life of Patricia Lockwood; Specimen might be considered our homegrown Priestdaddy. Key similarities: this collection of essays boasts an eccentric ministerial father, along with plenty of foibles and faux pas (both the author’s own, and those of a whole host of bizarre dramatis personae)—and it’s downright hilarious. So far, so brilliantly similar. Except—and I’m tiptoeing un-daintily around a massive spoiler, here—for the sex. A counterpart to Lockwood’s heterosexual relationship is nowhere to be seen. This is because Hamill reveals herself, in the aptly titled ‘I Will Never Hit on You’, as asexual.

Specimen is revelatory, maverick and nostalgia-piquing. It’s also a first book. Straight out of the gate, Hamill gives us non-fiction flecked with mad, rewarding moments of magical realism and hyperreality. As Hamill acknowledges in the Author’s Note: ‘Some of it is not true, such as the bit about the woman walking around with an axe in her head … I made that up because sometimes telling the truth requires lying.’ Read: she makes shit up, but only to tell it like it is. Isn’t this the essence of poetic licence, crisply defined? But it’s not just about creatively telling tales. This is nonfiction, after all, and any essay collection worth its salt should have a select bibliography this good, this wildly varied, charting Hamill’s topics from asexuality to avian behavioural psychology through to rural ethnography. [Read more…]

Beyond Beauty: Portraits of New Zealand history

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Cushla McKinney

No Man’s Land by A.J. Fitzwater (Paper Road Press, 2020), 154 pp, $22; Jerningham by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2020), 388 pp, $37

The best historical fiction gives readers a space to explore the origins of issues that continue to affect them. It also presents writers with unique challenges of voice, emotional plausibility, and historical and contemporary validity. Two new novels, No Man’s Land by Vogel Award-winner A.J. Fitzwater and Cristina Sanders’ first adult novel, Jerningham, tackle these challenges in different but equally engaging ways. 

In the early 1940s, when thousands of New Zealand men served in the armed forces overseas, women stepped into traditional male roles in farming, factories and other essential industries. This provides the backdrop for Fitzwater’s exploration of sex, gender and identity in No Man’s Land. [Read more…]