Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Alone in an Underwater City

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Michael Steven

Drinking With Li Bai by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 136pp, $22; Surprised by Hope by John Gibb (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 80pp, $28; Sheep Truck by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 48pp, $19.95

My preference as a poetry reader is for voices that operate and sing to us from the edges of the field; and for writers who have spent long hours observing the play of the world, honing and refining their perceptions, turning in reports that endure over the temporary and slight. The three collections at hand are by writers who all share the virtues of stillness, attention to craft, and the patience of careful observation.  [Read more…]

Haunted by Home

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Shana Chandra

Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles (Canongate Books, 2022), 272pp, $25; Sign Language for the Death of Reason by Linda Collins (Moth Paper Press, 2021), 141pp, $37.99; Island Notes: Finding my place on Aotea Great Barrier Island by Tim Highman (Cuba Press, 2021), 156pp, $38

The notion of home is both fragile and tenacious. It is an indication of our need for stability throughout the constant change that is life. We think of homes as solid: a house sturdy on the ground, our parents immortal, our country never changing. But all is eroded slowly by ravages of time or in an instant. A house is never as big as it was in our childhood eyes; our parents fade with age until they disappear. Our countries become smaller, too, as we travel away from them and look back; shores are washed-away; earthquake fault lines bring down towns; a war declares that a country is no longer ours. We often think of home as outside ourselves, not within us, despite it being something we hold precious in our mind—which may be why the notion of home seems so elusive. Each of the Aotearoa authors in this review either directly references or subtly hints at different notions of what home might be: they search for it, commemorate it, comment on it, or try to remember it, sometimes all at once. [Read more…]

Know Me for the One Who Will Remember

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Patricia Prime

The Song of Globule: 80 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2020), 82pp, $25; Heroides: 15 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Puriri Press, 2020), 24pp, $20

The Song of Globule by Stephen Oliver contains 80 sonnets and 14 pages of notes. Oliver is an Australasian poet and author of 21 volumes of poetry. In this volume, Oliver mines his experiences of living in Sydney in order to construct a convincing portrait of an ethereal young woman, Globule, footloose in Sydney and yet also tethered to it. From the first sonnet, ‘escape from Eden’, where he asks:

Did Globule sprout seraphic wings for flight?
not beneath this bumpy sky—not tonight.  [Read more…]

We Were the Wall of a Pātaka

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Andrew Paul Wood

Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan (Bridget William Books, 2022), 256pp, $49.99

Wind the clock back to the early 1800s, when Pākehā have just started establishing a significant presence in Aotearoa. Te Ātiawa hapū has occupied Taranaki for generations, but a new menace has arrived to disturb the peaceful equilibrium: European muskets, and with them, nearly a century of intertribal warfare in North Taranaki.

Te Ātiawa rushed to dismantle the most precious taonga from their carved buildings and hide them in Peropero swamp, intending to retrieve them later. Alas, that did not happen. Those who knew where they were hidden were captured or killed. [Read more…]

A Fool in Love

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Jack Ross

The Frog Prince by James Norcliffe (Random House New Zealand, 2022), 302pp, $36

I suppose one reason I’m fascinated by Grimms’ Fairy Tales—or, rather, the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), very few of which are actually about fairies—is because it’s the first book I ever read from cover to cover in German. At the time, I felt it was a good choice because I was already (I thought) familiar with the formulaic language of most of the stories (Es war einmal: Once upon a time). As it turned out, though, the experience taught me something about the nature of translation, which I’ve not been able to forget since. [Read more…]

No Turning Back

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David Eggleton

Culture in a Small Country: The arts in New Zealand by Roger Horrocks (Atuanui Press, 2022), 512pp, $45; A Book of Seeing by Roger Horrocks (Atuanui Press, 2022), 224pp, $38

A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep, wrote W.H. Auden; and so, as Aotearoa New Zealand dreams, Roger Horrocks, in Culture in a Small Country, strolls into frame and begins to weave connections across the national cultural output that go back decades, to his childhood and youth in the 1940s and 1950s. He plucks quotations from a wide variety of local sources to illustrate his state-of-the-nation thesis. His account stops in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, and his point, in the end, is to warn us of the dangers of cultural amnesia, stating: ‘this book has dealt mainly with the construction of our pre-digital culture as a creation story or whakapapa that all New Zealanders should value and recent New Zealand governments are not doing enough to safeguard the best of that tradition (prizing it as our taonga).’ [Read more…]