Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Unique Point of View

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Helen Watson White

The Girl from Revolution Road by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh (Allen & Unwin, 2020), 240pp., $36.99

What seems at first to be a book about difference—cultural, religious, social—is actually, in the end, about what holds people together. At every point where these real-life stories of Iranian-born filmmaker Ghazaleh Golbakhsh find resonance with a reader, a bond is formed that comes from the sense of a shared humanity. While I’m aware that that generalisation can be used to override the particular, or the individual, in The Girl from Revolution Road there is no danger of our not recognising difference as a positive value. This is a varied and accessible set of human stories, told from a unique point of view, and the effectiveness of the writing is all in the detail. [Read more…]

On Being Human 

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Piet Nieuwland

Enduring Love: Collected poemsby Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, 2020), 220pp., $40; How to be Happy Though Human: New and selected poems by Kate Camp (Victoria University Press, 2020), 160pp., $30; Yellow Moon/E Marama Rengarenga: Selected poems by Mary Maringikura Campbell (HeadworX, 2020), 84 pp., $25; New Transgender Blockbusters by Oscar Upperton (Victoria University Press, 2020), 72 pp., $25.00

At first glance, Enduring Love by Robert McLean feels like it’s going to take me places I’ve never been before. There are new references, and suggested connections to lives and events that seem peripheral and obscure.I am curious. If I keep Google on hand I will at least be in the park, if not in this particular game—it’s modernist with rhyme, not usually me, but here goes.  [Read more…]

Maternal Alchemy: The (surprisingly) beautiful entropy of motherhood

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Emma Gattey

When We Remember to Breathe: Mess, magic and mothering by Michele Powles and Renee Liang (Magpie Pulp, 2019), 211pp, $25

This is a love-addled, baby-brained, hormone soup of a book. And I could not be using those compounds in a more positive way. Billed as ‘a conversation by Michele Powles and Renee Liang’, this textual, maternal exchange between two gifted authors is one of radical honesty and vulnerability. Composed of emails exchanged during their second pregnancies (and beyond), this conversation feels easy, fluid and mutually beneficial. They thrilled and enthralled one another with the entropy of motherhood. To new parents, but mothers especially, there must be something deeply cathartic to this. Even for childless readers (myself included), there’s something reassuring about this creative kinship and solidarity through maternity. [Read more…]

A Little Bridge 

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Breton Dukes

The Stories of Eileen Duggan edited by Helen J. O’Neill with an introduction by John Weir (Victoria University Press, 2019), 342pp, $35

 

Let’s start with a shallow dive. Here’s Duggan describing two siblings in ‘The Solvent’:

Both were tireless workers. Those great bones of theirs could bend to burdens that would cow others. And in them was a broody touchiness where others were concerned, combined with a cuttle-fish skin when they hurt others. They never forgot underneath. Their resentments were like eels rising and uncoiling when the waters were stirred again

Eileen Duggan. Irish, Catholic. Born 1894. Raised in Tua Marina, just north of Blenheim. In her time, New Zealand’s most famous poet. ‘The greatest woman poet of this age,’ said the Dublin Review; ‘Exceptional,’ said the New York Times; ‘Doing for us what Katherine Mansfield did for the short story,’ said Railways Magazine. [Read more…]

A Common Silence

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Shana Chandra

Kalimpong Kids by Jane McCabe (Otago University Press, 2020), 139pp, $35

I have been struck by the silence that was common to our family histories, and by the role that photographs played in keeping curiosity alive.—Jane McCabe

As a historical record and document, Kalimpong Kids is a visual testament to the past, a collection of familial photographs that have survived as relics. Photographs that have provided clues to hushed stories handed down, muted by shame. Photographs of a society that kept hidden what it couldn’t palate. Photographs that say tangible things that lips could not. [Read more…]