Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Person is Fashioned and the Poem is Shaped until Poem and Person are One

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Piet Nieuwland

Albatross Neck: Landings by the Ancient Mariner and Romanticism in Aotearoa New Zealand 1770–2022 by Nigel Brown and Denys Trussell (Arcology Publishing, 2022), 247pp, $90; The Wanderer: Book Two by Ron Riddell (Casa Nueva Publishers, 2022), 117pp, $20; Songs to the Unsung by Kayleen M. Hazlehurst (Blue Dragonfly Press, 2023), 141pp, $26.50

In high school, we studied the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge with the help of a teacher who had sailed around the world. It was an influential poem but the question that dogged me was, why are we reading this English poem from a bygone era? We were also introduced to a suite of Romantic poets and later to William Blake in The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. At the time, I was a huge fan of the Ecologist magazine, edited by Edward Goldsmith, which provided challenging and stimulating essays on the global environmental crisis that was becoming increasingly apparent.  [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…]

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…]

The Past as Possibility

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Catherine Robertson

By the Green of the Spring by Paddy Richardson (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 312pp, $37.99; Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2022), 326pp, $37

A Listener review of The Luminaries charged Eleanor Catton with being ‘another New Zealand writer escaping into the past’. It’s true that many of our authors have been drawn to write at least one novel set in history, but with such variety of intent that the actual escape seems the least of their motives. There are novels that shed light on past injustice, both societal and individual; that give new life to voices marginalised or erased at the time; that aim to provide a more nuanced context for the present; or that simply can’t wait to share an absolute cracker of a tale. There are novels that are sweeping in scope and those that are intimate and personal. Some are based on scrupulous research, while others play fast and loose with the facts. The past is less a foreign country than an entire universe of possibility. [Read more…]

Plotting Pasifikafuturism 

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Sally Blundell 

Na Viro by Gina Cole (Huia, 2022), 352pp, $35 

Tia Grom-Eddy steers the carved kauri drua into the ocean current, the sail billowing and flapping above her. Wind in her face, the blue-black night sky alive with stars, she begins the long journey from Aotearoa along the Kermedec Trench and on, to the Lau archipelago, calling on the ancestral navigation skills that taught her ‘how to keep your body in tune with tides, flows, currents, animals, signs. The ways of her Fijian and Tongan and Mayuro ancestors, always guiding her.’ A few chapters on, Tia is using the same ancient methods of wayfinding to navigate another kind of drua, the Pawta, a huge, rock-like, voice-responsive, extra-terrestrial spaceship built by the inhabitants of far-away Thrae. Aboard the Pawta, she now rides the currents and swells of the mighty Tijen galactic whirlpool, in search of her sister, thought to be trapped in a tiny probe deep in the turbulent vortex. [Read more…]

A Matter of Judgement

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Chris Else

Slow Down, You’re Here by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence and Gibson, 2022), 206pp, $25

I am not sure how to tackle this review. I am tempted to call a spoiler alert because it is impossible to discuss this novel in any depth without giving away a plot twist that the reader deserves to experience without warning, as I did. On the other hand, if I assume my audience consists only of people who have already read the book then maybe I don’t need to talk about the plot at all. This, though, will make for a review that would be incoherent to other potential readers. It seems therefore that my ideal audience is people who are curious about the book but don’t actually intend to read it. I hope there aren’t many of you for I think this is an interesting novel that asks some serious questions and deserves to be read despite some stylistic quirks that I found irritating. [Read more…]