Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Light-sensitive

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David Eggleton
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00

Developed from a concept initiated by photographer Stephen Robinson, this book documents the creative processes of twenty-four artists within their native habitats. The selected assortment ranges far and wide nationally, though only one Maori artist is included and there are no Polynesian artists, or indeed other non-Pakeha artists, while the media synchronicities which characterise the twenty-first century are signalled with the listing at the back of the book of relevant dealer gallery websites.
         Each artist is allocated a self-contained chapter within which writer Richard Wolfe asks sensible questions and elicits illuminating answers. This well-designed book shows us what goes on behind the white cube as it were, with artists for the most part offering succinct summaries of what they do as they wield the tools of their trade and knock out artworks in idiosyncratic spaces.
         John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.

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Classic Review from 1961, by R.A. Copland

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R. A. Copland
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 57, published in March 1961 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. It is by R.A. Copland, then lecturing in English at the University of Canterbury.

Some are Lucky, Phillip Wilson. Denis Glover. 14s. 6d.
 
These are stories of New Zealand men who in the middle of the twentieth century are still ‘living on their lonesome’. The condition is mainly psychological, and though ‘Some Are Lucky’ – that is, some have come to terms, however uneasy, with themselves and with their lot – many remain as aliens in their own land. This emotional cloud hovers over the central clearing of each story in which the characters’ movements are carefully reported and the detail of their various trades faithfully documented. Since there is a vast amount of detail, topographical, botanical, social and occupational, which is peculiar to this country, Mr Wilson’s stories have a strongly indigenous quality; and even if one feels that he occasionally leans far out to seize the local name or the local object there can be no denying the toughness and solidity of his surfaces.
Mr Wilson’s accuracy in observation is of the ear as well as of the eye, and he catches the sound of our speech, sometimes with extraordinary precision. This is more notable in the narrative prose than in the dialogue itself. For example, the narrative prose of ‘Too Many Sheep’ is as delicately attuned to New Zealand intonations as anything ever written in this country. Consider the words ‘just’ and ‘hop’ in the following:
Got a temper like a child of six, the kind that is just uncontrollable. Dad was leaning   
against the rail of the yards, and when he saw Andrews hop out of the car he      
straightened up and stared at him.
And this sentence:
Well, Andrews installed his tribe and soon all the barbed wire fences for miles 
 around seemed to be hung out with washing and babies’ naps.

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Parish Moments

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Robert McLean
Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996—2009, John O’Connor (Post Pressed, Queensland, Australia, 2010), 144 pp., $25.00.
John O’Connor is a Christchurch poet who has had eight books of poetry published. His most recent book is Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996–2009, a sizable (144 pages) selection of previously published and new poems that are more or less in keeping with the qualification of the collection’s title.

            Is there irony in its tub-thumping title? The distinction between verse — often skating close to doggerel and to which is usually appended the qualifier ‘light’ — and poetry — assumed to be a far more serious proposition — amounts to one between low-brow ‘popular’ entertainment and high-brow diversions of the intelligentsia: not a realistic or clearly delineated division, but the tension generated by that division provides much of the energy crackling in these poems.
Whilst the poems in this book are derived from O’Connor’s lived experience – as a boy growing up in an Irish-Catholic household and parish; as a resident of the suburb of Addington; and as a taxi driver encountering smudged, damaged, or yobbish ‘characters’ – the experiences are treated with forensic detachment. There is a fierce and committed intelligence invested in these poems, which offer sharply-drawn characterisations, compassionate detachment, keen humour – and an uncompromising adherence to highly theoretical principles of composition that sometimes clash with or spark off the intransigent events on which they have been brought to bear.

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Not Doing Reverence

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South-West of Eden, A Memoir 1932–1956Philip Temple
South-West of Eden, A Memoir 1932–1956, C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2010), 345 pp., $45.00

For someone described by his publisher as a ‘towering figure in New Zealand literature’ – a description the author would probably endorse – one approaches the memoir of his youth with expectations of discovering the magical springs of his inspiration or, to the contrary, a story of childhood deprivation and loss that fuelled his high ambition and achievement.

The surprise is that C.K. ‘Karl’ Stead’s youth was rooted so firmly in the conventional and prosaic, within such a limited familial and environmental reach, that its narration, at times, becomes simply mundane. We must wait until Stead reaches university before the narrative becomes truly engaging; and therein lies the tale.

Stead lived all his childhood at 63 Kensington Avenue, Mount Eden, and went to nearby Mangawhau School before progressing to Mount Albert Grammar. For the first seventeen years of his life ‘there were five of us’ – ‘the grandmother’, mother Olive, father Jim and older sister Norma who, with Stead, formed a group ‘at intervals turbulent, sad, combative, hysterical; but … also full of jokes, music, good talk, caring and love.’ Stead was named for his Swedish master-mariner grandfather, Christian Karlson, a looming figure of romance and myth who, though dead before Stead was born, he felt to be ‘a sixth family member’ who ‘subtly, invisibly, ruled the roost.’ Karlson had built 63 Kensington Avenue over two quarter-acre sections in the early 1920s and, after his death, the most economic arrangement was for only child Olive and family to move in with her mother. For Stead’s father this seemed a ‘trap from which there was no escape; yet he loved the house and the garden, and made them (almost, but not quite) his own.’ [Read more…]