Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Frankness of Strangers

Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Kerry Lane

Out Here: An anthology of takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa, edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, 2021), 368pp, $49.99

It was when the beach boy told him quickly, confessionally, with the complete frankness of strangers who meet accidentally and know they are unlikely to see each other again, his life story.
—Peter Wells, from ‘Sweet Nothing’

Out Here is an imposing book, a large, heavy hardback with a bright cover, white and rainbow. You couldn’t slip it into a pocket or read it discreetly on the bus. It’s bold. It’s out and proud.  [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives 

Leave a Comment

Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history. 

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

The Politics of (In)Visibilities

Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

Sapphic Fragments: Imogen Taylor with essays by Milly Mitchell-Anyon and Joanne Drayton (Hocken Collections, 2020), 50pp, $35; Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton (Canterbury University Press, 2020), 200pp, $65

Sapphic Fragments is an intimate, provocative and critical publication that is in conversation with artist Imogen Taylor’s exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in Ōtepoti Dunedin in early 2020, and her eleven-month residency as the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. The Fellow’s publication is ever increasingly becoming an integral component of the residency ‘outcomes’, and Taylor’s is no exception. Slightly smaller than A4, with a soft card cover and a geometric-patterned, light gsm dust jacket, Sapphic Fragments, as an aesthetic object, sits partway between high-end artist’s workbook and Moleskine stationery. The considered intimacy of the book’s exterior is continued between the pages with the inclusion of iPhone photos taken either by Taylor or partner and architect Sue Hillery. This naming of Sue Hillery as Taylor’s partner is significant for several reasons that encompass Taylor, Hillery and contemporary lesbian/queer visibility while also reaching back into the past of Hodgkins (1869–1947) and her ‘friend’ (lover), Dorothy K. Richmond. Sapphic Fragments can be interpreted as an act of reframing, repositioning and reclaiming elided intimate histories (personal and artistic), while agentially self-positioning Taylor (and Hillery) in an attempt to prevent present or future homophobic omissions. From design to photographs and text, the publication materialises the politics of queer intimacy, collaboration and reclamation. [Read more…]

The Irreducible Self

Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press, 2020), 232 pp, $30

Stepping into the world of Madison Hamill is a bit like stepping into the crazy life of Patricia Lockwood; Specimen might be considered our homegrown Priestdaddy. Key similarities: this collection of essays boasts an eccentric ministerial father, along with plenty of foibles and faux pas (both the author’s own, and those of a whole host of bizarre dramatis personae)—and it’s downright hilarious. So far, so brilliantly similar. Except—and I’m tiptoeing un-daintily around a massive spoiler, here—for the sex. A counterpart to Lockwood’s heterosexual relationship is nowhere to be seen. This is because Hamill reveals herself, in the aptly titled ‘I Will Never Hit on You’, as asexual.

Specimen is revelatory, maverick and nostalgia-piquing. It’s also a first book. Straight out of the gate, Hamill gives us non-fiction flecked with mad, rewarding moments of magical realism and hyperreality. As Hamill acknowledges in the Author’s Note: ‘Some of it is not true, such as the bit about the woman walking around with an axe in her head … I made that up because sometimes telling the truth requires lying.’ Read: she makes shit up, but only to tell it like it is. Isn’t this the essence of poetic licence, crisply defined? But it’s not just about creatively telling tales. This is nonfiction, after all, and any essay collection worth its salt should have a select bibliography this good, this wildly varied, charting Hamill’s topics from asexuality to avian behavioural psychology through to rural ethnography. [Read more…]

On Being Human 

1 Comment

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…]