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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Poems as Memory 

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Arihia Latham

Sedition by Anahera Maire Gildea (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 150pp, $30; A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau by Briar Wood (Anahera Press, 2022), 85pp, $30

Ka maumahara te awa.
The river is memory,
Letters and feathers swim it,
(‘Channelling Rongo’ by Briar Wood)

If water is our memory, its every iteration has existed before, has informed us and becomes us. When we look at history and the notion i te ao Māori that we move into the future facing our past, whatever we embody and create is because of what and, particularly, who has gone before us. What we know about history documentation in the western world is that, like our awa that have been piped, diverted and polluted, so too have our stories. Records were inherently marred with racism and sexism, and many stories were altered or lost. Ka maumahara tātou. Let us remember like water. Let us flow memories like words through time. Let our memories flow like cool water, like hot lava; let them flow to meet us. [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

Standing Strong

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Tina Shaw

Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu women’s anthology, edited by Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (Victoria University Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

If ever one has viewed Vanuatu as an idyllic paradise where life is easy, Sista, Stanap Strong! will soon dispel the myth. This anthology of writing by Vanuatu women—the first of its kind—shines a light on women’s lives in the archipelago. In poems, non-fiction pieces, stories and song, themes emerge of violence towards women, a misogynistic and patriarchal society, colonialism, the importance of education, and concern for the kind of world children will one day inherit. [Read more…]

Filed Under: anthology, maori and pacific, memoir, poetry, short stories

On Not Judging Books by Their Covers

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana

Goddess Muscle by Karlo Mila (Huia Publishers, 2020), 220pp, $35; The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25; Home Base by Keith Westwater (The Cuba Press, 2021), 184pp, $25

On first inspection, including reading the cover blurbs, I saw that these were three very different books. Indeed, the only common thread seemed that all were published by separate Wellington-based publishers. Each one is particular in its own way. Two are poetry collections, while the third—Westwater’s—has more prose and realia than poetry crammed regimentally inside and deals solely with his army cadet years of 1964–1966. Upperton’s intriguing rich runnel of poetry never touches on Aotearoa New Zealand, contemporary or otherwise. Mila’s longer collection spans her mahi internationally from over a decade, across a variety of sectioned topoi.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

Liminal States

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Iona Winter

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia, 2021), 350pp, $35

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui, Pākehā) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML. A screenwriter, novelist, playwright, barrister and solicitor, she has been shortlisted and won awards for both her scriptwriting and her three novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice (2010), Bugs (2013) and Legacy (2018). And now we have Kurangaituku, shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2022. E hika, this wahine is consistent! In addition, I think it’s fair to say (and widely publicised) that Hereaka is also a whizz at creating captivating bird-woman attire for book launches. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, maori and pacific, Uncategorized

Writing Decolonisation, Rewriting Sovereignty

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Emma Gattey

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 120pp, $14.99; Imagining Decolonisation by Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Rebecca Kiddle, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 184pp, $14.99

Until relatively recently, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) seemed like one of literary and academic Aotearoa’s best-kept secrets. Whether parsing the poetry of Robert Sullivan, tracing the genealogical and creative connections between Māori and Pacific peoples, reformulating methodologies for Indigenous biography, history and literary scholarship, or dissecting the alienation of not-quite-belonging in either the English Department or Māori Studies, she is some kind of genius. And then she was awarded a Marsden Fund grant, published Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, contributed a heartrending chapter to Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface (Otago University Press, 2021) and delivered the 2021 Michael King Memorial Lecture. Irrepressible. With the publication of this accessible BWB Text alongside her other projects, Te Punga Somerville will be recognised as an invaluable public intellectual for so-called ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific, reviews and essays

Prating in Alien Tongues 

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

ināianei/now by Vaughan Rapatahana (Cyberwit, 2021), 170pp, $25; Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith (The Cuba Press, 2022), 86pp, $25

Among those who care about poetry in Aotearoa, Vaughan Rapatahana should be known particularly for two things. First, he is the most daring poet we have when it comes to seasoning his work with sesquipedalian lingo (that is, million-dollar words). Second, he has a more developed practice than anyone else when it comes to writing translingual poems in te reo Māori and English. His new collection, ināianei/now, offers plenty of examples of both modes, in poems that explore our fractured geopolitics, the dispossession and cultural losses of Māori, and the experience of dividing a life between different countries, as Rapatahana does. [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

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