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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Alone in an Underwater City

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Michael Steven

Drinking With Li Bai by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 136pp, $22; Surprised by Hope by John Gibb (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 80pp, $28; Sheep Truck by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 48pp, $19.95

My preference as a poetry reader is for voices that operate and sing to us from the edges of the field; and for writers who have spent long hours observing the play of the world, honing and refining their perceptions, turning in reports that endure over the temporary and slight. The three collections at hand are by writers who all share the virtues of stillness, attention to craft, and the patience of careful observation.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Know Me for the One Who Will Remember

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Patricia Prime

The Song of Globule: 80 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2020), 82pp, $25; Heroides: 15 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Puriri Press, 2020), 24pp, $20

The Song of Globule by Stephen Oliver contains 80 sonnets and 14 pages of notes. Oliver is an Australasian poet and author of 21 volumes of poetry. In this volume, Oliver mines his experiences of living in Sydney in order to construct a convincing portrait of an ethereal young woman, Globule, footloose in Sydney and yet also tethered to it. From the first sonnet, ‘escape from Eden’, where he asks:

Did Globule sprout seraphic wings for flight?
not beneath this bumpy sky—not tonight.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Hug Your Mother, Hold Her

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Fire by Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52pp, $37; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman (Otago University Press, 2021), 104pp, $27.50

What fire, indeed? This attractively printed collection with its fifty pages of poetry is prefaced with a quote from Volumnia, the honour-at-all-cost matron in Coriolanus: 

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire,
And then I’ll speak a little.

There is also a poem called ‘Volumnia’, with its lines: 

We had no use for history but Volumnia’s.
That woman against fire.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

The Killer Gene 

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 68pp, $24.99; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton (Otago University Press, 2022), 80pp, $25; Surrender by Michaela Keeble (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 130pp, $30

My only complaint about Tim Upperton’s work is that there is not enough of it. A Riderless Horse comes a full eight years after his last book, The Night We Ate the Baby, and, like that book and his first (A House on Fire in 2009), it has barely fifty pages of poems in it. But Upperton builds books like racing cars, without an unnecessary gram. In only thirty-two poems, we get full servings of hard-won wisdom and music and rue and pathos. In a recent interview, Upperton characterised A Riderless Horse as ‘a kinder, more reflective book’. Some of the strongest poems in the book seem to be evidence that this is true. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

‘Just the Darkness and the Fire’

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Francis Cooke

No Other Place to Stand: An anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and essa ranapiri (Auckland University Press, 2022), 220pp, $29.99

No Other Place to Stand is a book that grapples, from its opening pages, with its existence. ‘Climate changes is so massive … that one wonders about the value of the particular, the specific, the local, the here, the now’, Alice Te Punga Somerville writes in her foreword. ‘What is the point of quietly—or even noisily—reading about climate change when the crisis in which we find ourselves demands action?’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: anthology, poetry

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

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Recent reviews

  • Alone in an Underwater City
    Michael Steven on Drinking With Li Bai by Doc Drumheller; Surprised by Hope by John Gibb; Sheep Truck by Peter Olds
  • Haunted by Home
    Shana Chandra on Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles; Sign Language for the Death of Reason by Linda Collins; Island Notes: Finding my place on Aotea Great Barrier Island by Tim Highman
  • Know Me for the One Who Will Remember
    Patricia Prime on The Song of Globule: 80 sonnets and Heroides: 15 sonnets by Stephen Oliver
  • We Were the Wall of a Pātaka
    Andrew Paul Wood on Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan
  • A Fool in Love
    Jack Ross on The Frog Prince by James Norcliffe

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