Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Everything is Turning to Sound

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Majella Cullinane

Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine, 2018), 280 pp., $35

A passion for music, and its ability to connect the most dissimilar of women, Eva McAlester and Grace Coles, lies at the heart of the novel Gone to Pegasus. Divided into four parts that correspond to musical tempos, the story is set in February 1892, and from the outset provides the reader with vivid, engaging evocations of place: Dunedin, New Delhi and Lake Wakatipu.

The novel opens in Dunedin, and we follow twenty-year-old Eva as she leaves her house on Pitt Street, walks past Knox Church, through the Octagon and on to Princes Street. Eva is about to audition for a part in a choir, and as she passes three men playing Vivaldi she is reminded that her husband has been incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. [Read more…]

The Importance of Rivers

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Graeme Wynn

The Waikato: A history of New Zealand’s greatest river by Paul Moon (Atuanui Press, 2018), 456 pp., $69.99; New Zealand’s Rivers: An environmental history by Catherine Knight (Canterbury University Press, 2016), 324 pp., $49.99

‘Rivers compel attention and invite stories.’ These words open an intriguing doctoral dissertation completed in 1999 in the Department of English in the University of British Columbia by New Zealander Charles Dawson.1 They introduce a twisting, tumbling, rippling, glinting, eddying and surging torrent of ideas and observations that washes over an impressively varied array of personal essays, novels and poetry, brushes the banks of theory, and entrains contemporary anxieties along the way. Most of the authors Dawson considers engage, as he does, in ‘river reflection’ – a ‘process of articulation, born of contemplation and engagement with mental and physical streams’. Their physical streams are almost entirely North American, but their articulations emphasise interconnections through memory and myth, ecology and community, damage and loss, to produce particular ways of seeing and understanding.  [Read more…]

Gardens and Gloom

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Emer Lyons

This Joyous, Chaotic Place: Garden poems by Heather McPherson (Spiral, 2018), 88 pp., $25; Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon by Anna Jackson (Seraph Press, 2018), 24 pp., $20; Last Stop Before Insomnia/Dernier Arrêt Avant l’Insomnie by Marlène Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier (Seraph Press, 2018) 40 pp., £20

Heather McPherson was the first out lesbian published in New Zealand with A Figurehead: A face (Spiral), which appeared in 1982. Her ground-breaking role is something I cherish and consciously bring to my reading of This Joyous, Chaotic Place, McPherson’s posthumously published fifth collection. All the poems here have been carefully edited by Janet Charman, Lynne Ciochetto and Marian Evans, who formed a new Spiral collective to fulfil the request McPherson made before she died, that Charman edit what she called ‘the garden poems’.  [Read more…]

Engaging Photography

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Jodie Dalgleish

Gavin Hipkins: The Domain (Victoria University Press, 2017), 240 pp., $70

The monograph Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, released in November 2017 to mark the opening of the Dowse Art Museum’s largest-ever survey exhibition of the same name, is a beautifully produced, super-illustrated tome. It begins with three ‘meaty’ essays, ends with a plethora of historic texts, and contains 147 pages of colour plates (over half the book) in between. Significantly, it provides an opportunity to more singularly study the richly proliferative, multi-threaded and motif-circling practice of a senior New Zealand artist working across still and moving image in both gallery and cinema contexts. However, the non-indexed, non-thematic (and non-chronological) ordering of its wedge of colour plates might hamper that study at times. [Read more…]

A Vocal Wiri

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Karyn Paringatai

Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori women poets in translation, edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis (Seraph Press, 2018), 40 pp., $20

He tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu. He tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa.
The starry hosts of heaven abide there for ever. The hosts of humans on earth pass away into oblivion.

tātai whetū: 1. (noun) constellation, cluster of stars

The ‘stars’ of Tātai Whetū, a collection of seven poems by seven Māori women poets, take the reader on a wistful journey that traverses the boundaries of the spiritual and physical realms. The poets who composed these poems will inevitably pass on from this physical world – he tātai whetū ki te whenua, ngaro noa – but their words and thoughts are hung in the metaphysical space of the heavens above as guiding lights never to be extinguished – he tātai whetū ki te rangi, tū tonu.

A highly charged current of feminine strength underlies the poems in this collection. Māori history is rich with narratives featuring strong female figures who defy the odds and are a powerful force to be reckoned with: ‘I heard their karanga, the dawn voice, centuries of women rising up in a vocal wiri from the motu …’ Anahera Gildea reminds us that we are a continuation of those who have gone before us and our karanga will add to the resounding echoes of quivering voices that will be heard for generations to come. [Read more…]