Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Portals into Possibility

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Octavia Cade

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, 2019), 666pp., $35

Fantasy comes with expectation. It’s a genre of escapism, often involving a very literal escape from one world and into another. Escape, however, is rarely so linear, and there is an expectation that the problems of one world manifest themselves in new ways in another. What it means to be left behind, what it means to compromise yourself, what it means to lose faith and then find it again … these are questions of isolation, of consequence, and of the transformation of self that goes with the movement between worlds.  [Read more…]

A Cultural Journey

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Shirley Simmonds 

Te Kōparapara: An introduction to the Māori world, eds Michael Reilly, Suzanne Duncan, Gianna Leoni, Lachy Paterson, Poia Rewi, Lyn Carter and Matiu Rātima (Auckland University Press, 2018), 484 pp, $69.99

In the same way that we search a crowd for someone we might know, or scan a group photo for a familiar face, my eyes ran down the contents list on the inside pages of Te Kōparapara. Initially I was drawn not to the chapter headings, but to the names below each title.

Some I knew, some I knew of, and some I didn’t know but wanted to. Then I read the chapter headings for each to see what their particular kaupapa was, their contribution, their gift to this impressive and weighty compendium. [Read more…]

Sailing into the Wind

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Tom Brooking 

100 Days that Mapped a Nation by Graeme Lay (New Holland Publishers, 2019), 208pp, $65

This is the first Cook book I have ever reviewed, although I have managed a couple of large tomes on French exploration in the Pacific, and taught Honours courses on early New Zealand featuring the outstanding navigator from Yorkshire. Such books will appear relatively frequently over the next few months as the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival is commemorated. Unlike most recipe books, however, some of these publications are destined to be controversial. One of the reasons for the contentious nature of the Cook story is that some Polynesian historians, like Haunani-Kay Trask of Hawai`i, see Cook as personifying all the baleful impacts of colonisation upon indigenous peoples. Some Māori commentators, including descendants of Rongowhakata, the iwi settled around Gisborne, feel much the same way. They cite the killing of nine of their tīpuna and current problems – such as the high prison incarceration rates of Māori, on-going poverty and educational underachievement – in support of their claim that European colonisation of New Zealand has seriously damaged the indigenous people of the last major land mass on earth to be settled by humans. Such critics seem set on supporting the now rather outdated notion of the ‘fatal impact’ of colonisation, which portrays all indigenous people as hapless victims without any historical agency. [Read more…]

Small Fictions to Un-bugger the World

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Rushi Vyas

Where We Land by Tim Jones (The Cuba Press, Novella Series; originally published as Landfall by Paper Road Press, 2015), 75pp., $22; The Everrumble by Michelle Elvy (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019), 107pp., $18; Soul Etchings by Sandra Arnold (Retreat West Books, 2019), 174pp., $19.99

A new arrival to Aotearoa from America after my partner landed a job at the University of Otago, I attended my first New Zealand poetry reading at the Dog With Two Tails in Dunedin this August. The night served as my introduction to the Kiwi literary scene. Brian Turner was the featured poet and I still remember one of his poems vividly. ‘New Zealander: A definition’ reads ‘Born here, buggered it up’. My first thought when hearing that poem was how I could replace ‘New Zealander’ with ‘American’ and the poem would still resonate. I wondered how many people around the globe could replace ‘New Zealander’ with their country’s moniker for citizens. When reading the three fiction-esque books in this review, I saw them as loose responses to Turner’s poem. While they each take a different approach in form and worldview, they share a concern with how we can respond now that we’ve ‘buggered up’ the world.  [Read more…]

The Architecture of Grief

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Lynn Davidson

Lost and Somewhere Else by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press, 2019), 80pp, $25; Moth Hour by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2019), 104pp, $25; The Grief Almanac: A sequel by Vana Manasiadis (Seraph Press, 2019), 110pp, $30

I love to read poets who circle certain material and go deeper in with each new book. I remember feeling this sense of archaeological pleasure when I read Jenny Bornholdt’s wonderful The Rocky Shore, and I feel it again now, reading Lost and Somewhere Else. The book weaves in preoccupations we have met before in her work, including reflections on family and friends, gardens and clothes. The clothes on the line in the opening poem all have a story attached to them, including ‘The shirt / he wore to talk about / paintings.’ I enjoy how the world of art and work and the world of our private domestic selves, our vulnerable animal selves, are not separated from each other. It is a book about connections, and the striking cover design includes a mushroom – fungi being the great connector, the internet of the underground. Lost and Somewhere Else is also a book about the often-bewildering process of becoming ‘girl’ and about the process of unbecoming. It charts losses: children go out and ‘forget / to come home again’. Family members die: ‘Our middle age / is one long goodbye.’ The Earth is in peril, and just living (and especially flying) is dangerous. It puts the relationship between love and loss front and centre: ‘Now, nearing sixty, / this woman loves her husband/ferociously.’  [Read more…]