Erik Kennedy
Always Song in the Water by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2019), 264pp., $45; Mary Shelley Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade (Aqueduct Press, 2019), 88pp., US$12; A Year of Misreading the Wildcats by Orchid Tierney (The Operating System, 2019), 108pp., US$24
A book about New Zealand’s remoteness from the rest of the world is timely right now. The fact that it has nothing to do with pandemics or politics is a blessed relief. Gregory O’Brien’s Always Song in the Water is an artist’s journal of dozens of sparkling essaylets, poems and artworks that together advance the thesis that Aotearoa New Zealand is first and foremost a Pacific nation. Based around two trips that O’Brien took to some of the farther-flung outposts of New Zealand’s territory—a road trip in Northland and a sea voyage to the Kermadecs—the book argues for an ‘archipelagic concept’ of nationhood. Only one-seventeenth of New Zealand is dry land, if you take into account its exclusive economic zone, and O’Brien makes a strong case that it is the sea that gives coherence to our lives and art. [Read more…]