Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Irreducible Self

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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…]

Hear Our Voices

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Giovanni Tiso 

The Broken Estate by Mel Bunce (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 224pp., $14.99; Student Political Action in New Zealand by Sylvia Nissen (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 168pp., $14.99

To receive reliable information about the world; and to be able to act on this information to change how society works. These basic conditions for democracy are the subject of two new books in Bridget Williams’ Texts series. Mel Bunce’s The Broken Estate explores the state of contemporary journalism, asking whether it is still (or ever was) equipped to fulfil its dual role of informing the public and helping to produce imagined communities. Sylvia Nissen’s Student Political Action in New Zealand examines the realities faced by young people undertaking university education and how these shape or constrain their political expression.  [Read more…]

Twinned Roots

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Nina Mingya Powles

All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, 2020), 240 pp., $30

All Who Live on Islands won the 2018 Modern Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and is the latest in a string of excellent creative nonfiction books published by Victoria University Press. Lu’s essays explore numerous subjects including her rural Whanganui childhood, teenage sex, travel and working in the tech industry. Her writing is at once tender and incisive, detailed and expansive, heated and brilliantly funny.  [Read more…]

Witness Marks

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Jodie Dalgleish 

Kaitiaki o te Pō by John-Paul Powley (Seraph Press, 2018), 165 pp, $35

In his book of essays, Kaitiaki o te Pō, historian and teacher John-Paul Powley ruminates on self and a broader culture through the flow of his life, which eddies around the jut of histories and events that break a country’s current into caesurae. Each one is a stopping point full of personal refusals and tentative potentialities, poignant and sometimes rousing. [Read more…]

The Grit that Makes the Pearl 

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Tasha Haines

The Writing Life: Twelve New Zealand authors by Deborah Shepard (Massey University Press, 2018), 463 pp., $49.99

In her introduction to The Writing Life, Deborah Shepard highlights the determination and passion of the twelve writers she interviews and curates into this collection. Shepard has selected a diverse group covering many genres: from writing for children, to many approaches to the novel, poetry and non-fiction. The writers are Joy Cowley, Marilyn Duckworth, Tessa Duder, Chris Else, Patricia Grace, David Hill, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Philip Temple and Albert Wendt. [Read more…]

I Would Like to Try That Voice Out

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Courtney Sina Meredith

 

The Fuse Box, edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price (Victoria University Press, 2017) 296 pp., $35

The Fuse Box is a collection of essays on writing by celebrated writers from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price, contributors include Lloyd Jones, Elizabeth Knox, Tusiata Avia, Pip Adam, Damien Wilkins, Bill Manhire, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Gary Henderson, Tina Makereti, Ken Duncum, Ashleigh Young and Hera Lindsay Bird.

The blurb promises writing strategies and guidance for all stages of writing life from poets, dramatists, novelists and writing teachers, but essentially this is a book about creative survival and a survey of the private processes of storytellers. The essay forms are as eclectic as the subjects they address. There are interviews, poems as essays and poems within essays, chapters that read like manifestos, experimental moments of impact, and the more traditional essay of pages dripping in words. Some pieces feel like a good friend exploring their personal wisdom while others are more academic, detached and contemplative.  [Read more…]