Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Copy That

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Tasha Haines

Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media by Jacob Edmond (Columbia University Press, 2019), 346pp., US$64.99

Ezra Pound’s famous maxim ‘Make it new!’ was not new at all; Pound acquired the idea, whether advertently or inadvertently, from a Chinese Confucian scholar, who passed it on to an Emperor … The questions: What is original? What is a copy? What is new? are core to modernity and yet, as Frederick Jameson wrote and Jacob Edmond discusses in Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media, there is nothing new that does not have antecedents. So the compound question arises: when is ‘the new’ also a copy or, more specifically here, an ‘iteration’ of what has gone before, and how does this inform creative practice and statements of identity?  [Read more…]

Quite a Ride

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Helen Watson White

Making History: A New Zealand story by Jock Phillips (Auckland University Press, 2019), 373pp., $45

In 1973 it was considered newsworthy that a couple of young postgrads, Phillida Bunkle and Jock Phillips (then called John), had come to teach at Victoria University of Wellington, sharing a four-course lectureship in the field of American history. Since few, if any, academics with ‘identical’ qualifications had occupied the same job before, in a small way they were making history, and on 16 June the Dominion made a note (and photo) of it. The couple’s motivations were a reflection of the times. Phillips is quoted as saying that in the US, where they had been living, the counter-culture had ‘launched an attack on American middle-class ambition and the emphasis on men “getting ahead”. Men are beginning to feel now that the job is not everything.’  [Read more…]

Solitary Grandeur

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Martin Edmond

McCahon Country by Justin Paton (Penguin Random House NZ, in association with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), 304 pp., $75

This year is the centenary of the birth of Colin McCahon, and among the publications celebrating that event is Justin Paton’s McCahon Country. It is not the only one. The first of Peter Simpson’s two-volume chronicle of McCahon’s life and work will be published in October 2019, with the second to follow in June next year; and Wystan Curnow’s long-delayed opus is also rumoured to be coming out in 2020. None of these books is, or will be, properly speaking, a biography. Indeed, three decades after his death, we still lack a comprehensive life of the artist. Gordon Brown’s Colin McCahon: Artist, first published in 1984, is more an elucidation of the work than of the man; as is Simpson’s work; as Curnow’s presumably will be. As Justin Paton’s book, with qualifications, also is. [Read more…]

Reeling Them In

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Helen Watson White

Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948–2000 by John Reid (Victoria University Press, 2018), 462pp, $60

Whatever It Takes is an apt title for John Reid’s story of the formation of Pacific Films, an enterprise that dared to dream in an age when dreaming was expensive. The No. 8 wire mentality, necessitated by insufficient funding for almost any part of independent film-making, is exemplified in countless ways in this account, from the building of a camera dolly with bicycle wheels, to the capture of the 1953 Royal Tour on three cameras simultaneously, by mounting them on the same frame, the results of the shoot destined for three different agencies, each paying for a share of news footage of the glamorous royal couple ‘abroad’. [Read more…]

Tasman Crossings

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Lucy Sussex

West Island: Five twentieth-century New Zealanders in Australia by Stephanie Johnson (Otago University Press, 2019), 284pp. $39.95

In the nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand were termed ‘the Seven Austral Colonies’. They comprised seven different entities, linked by geography and a common coloniser. Passage between them was frequent, with colonial book companies opening offices, say, in Dunedin, Hobart and Melbourne, and magazines like the Australian Journal having both New Zealand distribution and content. Travel might have taken longer, but the relationship was closer. [Read more…]