Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Nothing Inside But Stars

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Rachel Smith

A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha: An anthology of new writing for a changed world edited by Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy (Massey University Press, 2023), 359pp, $39.99

Skip back three years or so to when the world was beginning to understand what the COVID-19 pandemic would be. It’s here that writers and editors Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy began to consider the project that would become A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha. This book is not a pandemic anthology. It encompasses much more, taking the reader to places before, after and through this time, and many voices from Aotearoa and abroad tell stories of who we were and are, and of the challenges that have long been with us—decolonisation, indigeneity, climate change. [Read more…]

When X You Have No Other Name

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Genevieve Scanlan

Deep Colour by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press, 2023), 82pp, $25; Sea Skins by Sophia Wilson (Flying Island Books, 2023), 98pp, $10; This is a Story About Your Mother by Louise Wallace (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 88pp, $25; Past Lives by Leah Dodd (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 96pp, $25

Diana Bridge’s eighth collection, Deep Colour, opens with two epigraphs. One, from W.G. Sebald, speaks to ‘how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface’. Fitting, then, that the titular poem begins ‘Somewhere down there in the aquarium’. From the first page, this collection immediately demonstrates with what masterful skill Bridge can plumb all sorts of depths. The titular poem draws from marine murk startling personal clarity: ‘One truth will soon displace / another […] A life gathers its themes, / some of which it may never weave’. [Read more…]

I Hear You, I Hear You

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Loveday Why

The Artist by Ruby Solly (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 144pp, $30; Foxstruck and Other Collisions by Shari Kocher (Puncher & Wattman, 2020), 144pp, AUS$30; Iris and Me by Philippa Werry (The Cuba Press, 2023), 175pp, $25

Te Korekore is the void, the space of emptiness and potential, the portal of creation. These three poetry books—two verse novels, one intricately structured collection—swerve away from and toward the void, emerging from it and dissolving into it in iterative remakings of the self through story. As they grapple with themes of identity, family, disability, artistry and the ecospiritual connection to land and water, poetry itself is shown as crucial to the generations-long work of weaving and reweaving personal identity and attempting a collective sense of home. [Read more…]

Neither Just Nor Fair

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Tom Brooking

The Fate of the Land Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori political struggle in the Liberal era 1891–1912 by Danny Keenan (Massey University Press, 2023), 328pp, $65

This is a timely book because it adds much to the distressing story of the concerted Māori effort to slow the alienation of their land and reveals more about this key tussle than has formally been available. Keenan builds on, critiques and extends the work of several Pākehā historians including Keith Sorrenson, Alan Ward, W.H. Oliver, Judith Binney, Graham Butterworth, Paul Moon, Richard Hill, the legal historians David Williams and Richard Boast, and the geographer J.S. Duncan, all of whom criticised Keith Sinclair for claiming that the Liberals paid a ‘fair’ price for Māori land. Ranginui Walker’s major biography of Āpirana Ngata and Joe Pere’s work on farming on the East Coast also added much useful information on the continued battle waged by Ngata on behalf of Ngāti Porou. [Read more…]

The Past Is Never Dead

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Victor Billot

Histories of Hate: The radical right in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley (Otago University Press, 2023), 444pp, $50

Histories of Hate starts at the end of the story so far—15 March 2019—the date when the radical right achieved its first notable twenty-first-century intervention in New Zealand politics and society, the terrorist attack in Christchurch. After a century or more of largely ineffective activity, the radical right has found a new lease of life in the last few years. Its incoherence meant it failed to capitalise on upsurges of social discontent at key moments in New Zealand’s history. But this incoherence has become an advantage in the contemporary post-COVID, post-truth era, as the radical right embeds itself in a nexus of conspiracy, paranoia and prejudice. [Read more…]