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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

‘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

Across the Great Divide

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana

On Elephant’s Shoulders by Sudha Rao (The Cuba Press, 2022), 82pp, $25; Expectation by Tom Weston (Steele Roberts, 2022), 64pp, $25; Echidna by essa may ranapiri (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25

When I first read the poetry across these three new collections, published by three separate presses, I failed to see a unifying theme. After all, one was penned by a new Kiwi who came to Aotearoa from India and now resides in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. One was created by a prolific takatāpui Māori poet based in Kirikiriroa. One was crafted by a poet I had not encountered previously, who is a lawyer from Tāmaki Makaurau. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry, queer writing

People Poems

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Airini Beautrais

Everyone is Everyone Except You by Jordan Hamel (Dead Bird Books, 2022), 69pp, $30; A Question Bigger than a Hawk by Jan FitzGerald (The Cuba Press, 2022), 72pp, $25; People Person by Joanna Cho (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 95pp, $30

Jordan Hamel is a performance poet as well as a poet for the page, having won the New Zealand Poetry Slam in 2018 and represented New Zealand at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, has strongly performative qualities. These poems interrogate their subject matter in ways that would be equally at home on page or stage: from the visceral horror of ‘Meat mannequin’ to the creepy kink of ‘Sex toy roadshow’, exploring 90s nostalgia, Christianity and Kiwi bloke culture along the way. The shock value in these poems doesn’t feel gratuitous, more part of a performance of introspection. How deep do we go before we come right out the other side, into something else? Perverseness seems an important part of the process. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Resonant Deformations

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens 

Seasons by William Direen (South Indies Text & Music Publishing, 2022), 72pp, $22; Resonating Distances by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books, 2022), 150pp, $30; Breach by Lisa Samuels (Boiler House Press, 2021), 75pp, $28

William Direen’s Seasons prompted me to consider readerly expectations of access to a speaker’s inner world. A man spends a year in the remote Strath Taieri/Maniototo—inland and north of Ōtepoti Dunedin—but seemingly withholds his reasons for being there. Is he ‘taking time out’ or is he really there to engage with the region’s hot summers and winter snow? If it is the latter, which encompasses the entanglement of people, weather, land, and livelihood, shouldn’t this be sufficient? 

Perhaps the description of the collection as a ‘poetry diary’ led this reader to expect access to the speaker’s ‘inner world’, to his perspectives on the events unfolding around him— seasonal and otherwise. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Lines of Defence

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Victor Billot 

Gorse Poems by Chris Holdaway (Titus Books, 2022), 72pp, $25; The Stupefying by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 88pp, $25

Chris Holdaway (b. 1989) belongs to a new generation of New Zealand poets by demographic. He is set apart from his peers by his distinctive style and his role as publisher and printer of poetry. As founding editor of Minarets journal and co-founder of Compound Press, Holdaway has produced a substantial number of publications, which provides an intriguing angle in consideration of his own writing. It is a thread back to New Zealand poet/printers of previous eras as well as a contemporary link to the world of DIY indie music and zine production (although it must be said his production standards are well above the norm). This is his first full-length collection, but Holdaway has previously produced a chapbook, has been widely published in New Zealand and overseas, and is a MFA graduate of the Notre Dame creative writing programme. The back of the book features insightful words from his former teacher, the remarkable American poet Joyelle McSweeney, as well as New Zealand poet Michael Steven. So, this is a ‘debut’ that perhaps carries more weight than many first collections.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

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