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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Habits of Hearing and the Practice of Seeing 

February 18, 2021 Leave a Comment

Rushi Vyas

A Habit of Writing by Helen Jacobs (Cuba Press, 2020), 60pp, $25; Social Media by Mary Macpherson (Cuba Press, 2019), 56pp, $25; Sinking Lessons by Philip Armstrong (Otago University Press, 2020), 54pp, $27.50

When you pick up Helen Jacobs’ A Habit of Writing, the first thing you’ll notice is the stunning, vivid cover, a detail from artwork by Julia van Helden. While I’m no art scholar or critic, the impressionistic sketch prompted me to stop and breathe in the colors—a fitting primer to Helen Jacobs’ meditative poems. Writing these poems as a 91-year-old environmental activist and former mayor of Eastbourne, Jacobs draws from life in a retirement village. While the title speaks to the ‘habit of writing’, the poems emerge from a habit of noticing, of paying close attention. These poems could only be written by someone with a deep practice of skilful observation, both of the physical world and the realm of thought. Many of Jacobs’ poems are short, capturing a small image from life as a retiree. Their simple diction but cleverly shaped syntax stilled me. I found myself drawn to re-read and, indeed, to slow down from my own wily mind. These poems carry within them a depth of metaphorical resonance and complex knowing. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

On Being Double

February 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Chris Else

Nothing to See by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press, 2020), 380pp, $30

Pip Adam is one of our most innovative writers. She is one of a group of accomplished stylists to come out of the International Institute of Modern Letters but she also has sufficient grip on standard narrative conventions to successfully play around with them.

Her first novel, I am Working on a Building, is told backwards from narrative present to past and turns on the idea of constructing a replica of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, on New Zealand’s West Coast—I guess, in defiance of the Alpine Fault. In The New Animals she twists the expectations of conventional plot structures. The first two-thirds of the book are tightly focused on a group of disparate characters preparing for a fashion show, shifting point of view in a claustrophobic exploration of intergenerational attitudes; the last third dives off in a new direction as one of the characters, barely mentioned up to this point, swims out to sea and keeps on swimming through the Waitematā Harbour into the Hauraki Gulf and on. The shape of the novel feels like an apostrophe or, perhaps more aptly, a flea with a compact body and a pair of long back legs that propel it suddenly in a new direction. In Adam’s latest novel, Nothing to See, the convention she explores is unity of character. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

Beautiful, Warped Slips of Wilderness

February 1, 2021 1 Comment

Emma Gattey

Īnangahua Gold by Kathleen Gallagher (KingFisher Publishing, 2018), 183pp, $30; In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough (Victoria University Press, 2020), 300pp, $40

Through a third lockdown in the United Kingdom, I’ve had the immense pleasure of devouring two works by New Zealand authors, both indelibly marked by aroha ki te taiao (love of nature). One, a slender historical novel of emotional heft. The other, a masterwork memoir of—to borrow the language of the author Miro Bilbrough—‘feral dreaming’.

First, Īnangahua Gold. This beautiful nugget of a book is thriftily bound in what must be recycled paper, but is worth its weight in gold. Kathleen Gallagher’s compact yet expansive novel time-switches between 1857, tracking an odd threesome’s westward trek along the Hurunui River on the East Coast of the South Island, and 1877, centring on the West Coast settlement of Īnangahua. The 1857 expedition party is led by Raureka, Ngāi Tahu guide and exemplar of mana wāhine (power/strength of women), and Murphy, a recent Irish immigrant who occasionally flares up into anti-British, anti-imperial ire at their paymaster, Pepper. The latter is a credible caricature of the colonial Englishman abroad, and desperate to ‘be the first Englishman to cross’ the Southern Alps and thus win naming rights to the pass. Pepper is volatile, racist, a least-favoured son. One moment, he cannot believe he is travelling with ‘a Māori Princess and an Irish scholar gypsy’, and the next, he resents ‘that Irish scoundrel’ and ‘that Māori servant’. He is terrified of this unfamiliar, unbiddable land and those who love it.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

Death and Weirdness in the Surfing Zone

February 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Victor Billot 

Dance Prone by David Coventry (Victoria University Press, 2020), 394pp, $35

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me.

It was twenty years ago today.

History never repeats …

David Coventry’s Dance Prone goes back to the mid-1980s, to a pre-rave, pre-irony, pre-grunge universe, out in the flatlands, where the post-war American Dream is progressively sinking under its own weight. To think, 1985 was only 18 years after the release of Sgt Pepper’s. It’s nearly twice that length of time between 1985 and now. Yet that border decade between THEN and NOW spreads its shadow for generations. The Summer of Love is a historical curiosity in black and white footage, whereas the 1980s still seem within reach, in a strange kind of way—at least for Gen Xers like author David Coventry or this reviewer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction

Te Tiriti Then and Now

February 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Waitangi: A Living Treaty by Matthew Wright (Bateman Books, 2019), 296pp, $39.99 

Professor Paul Moon says of the Treaty of Waitangi in his Foreword to this book: ‘The intricate web of colonial policy that was spun in years leading to its signing requires disentangling.’ He notes the Treaty’s evolution and its ‘layers of interpretations and meanings’. Te Tiriti o Waitangi can be seen as a shared idea—or plurality of ideas—one that began in 1840 with 176 words in te reo Māori, 226 words in English; a modest document compared with other founding documents such as the US Declaration of Independence (1337 words) or England’s Magna Carta (4478 words). Today Te Tiriti has morphed into a resolution process dealing with historical grievances as well as more recent issues such as the place of concepts like kaitiakitanga rights in the Exclusive Economic Zone. Te Tiriti has always been attributed with interpretations that stretch beyond the mere meanings of the words. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, politics

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