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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Revolution Matters

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Philip Matthews

Jumping Sundays: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, 2022), 408pp, $49.99

Nick Bollinger’s rich new history of New Zealand counterculture, Jumping Sundays, is named for the initially spontaneous weekly occupations or liberations of Albert Park in Auckland in the distant spring of 1969. Bollinger paints a picture and it is bucolic and innocent, like a scene from Tolkien: ‘A rock band played on the rotunda. Some people held hands, some danced alone, some sat under trees with guitars, flutes and bongos and made music of their own. They wore kaftans, ponchos and leather-fringed jerkins, floppy hats, headbands, beads and flowers’. It seems at first to be an unthreatening, inclusive and pleasant local imitation of similar scenes that unfolded a year or two earlier in less sedate countries, but there are police keeping watch on the edges of the park. [Read more…]

Of Magpies and Mountains

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Gina Cole

Butcherbird by Cassie Hart (Huia, 2021), 356pp, $25

Cassie Hart’s supernatural thriller Butcherbird won the 2022 Sir Julius Vogel Award for best novel. Hart has previously self-published novels and novellas as well as short fiction under pen names J.C. Hart and Nova Black. Butcherbird is her first work published by Huia. It is a project Hart worked on as a participant of Te Papa Tupu, a writers’ incubator designed for emerging Māori writers. Hart writes speculative fiction and paranormal romance, and Butcherbird sits more towards the supernatural, horror, suspense side of speculative fiction. It is set in rural Taranaki where Hart grew up and, fittingly, Taranaki Maunga features as a guardian-like presence in the book, watching over events as they slowly unfold in the narrative.  [Read more…]

Platonic Models

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Harry Ricketts

Next: Poems 2016–2021 by Alan Roddick (Otago University Press, 2022), 82pp, $27.50; Night School by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, 2022), 84pp, $25; Sonnets for Sio by Scott Hamilton (Titus Books, 2022), 74pp, $25.

All poems contain their own platonic notion of poetry: that is, what a poem is or can be, and how it might behave. So, Paradise Lost embodies a particular version of the epic. The Waste Land embodies a certain version of the modern poem just after the First World War. A hundred years later, Rebecca Hawkes’s ‘Pink fairy armadillo’, say, or James Brown’s ‘War and Design’, Ruby Solly’s ‘Behold the line’, Chris Tse’s ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ each (in its distinctive way) embodies a particular version of what—here, now—poetry is or might be. I don’t mean that this platonic notion is necessarily part of the poet’s consciousness in writing the poem (although in some instances, such as Paradise Lost and The Waste Land, it obviously is). If, as Auden wittily proposed, poems read us, it is also the case that they read themselves. And, in doing so, they adumbrate certain ideas about the nature of poetry. 

The same is true of poetry collections. Alan Roddick’s Next: Poems 2016–2021, for instance, presupposes poetry as something readily accessible, a verbal machine that preserves and presents experiences and feelings in such a way that any reader can imaginatively enter into them. [Read more…]

A Principled Resistance

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Erik Kennedy

The Other Way by David Trubridge (David Trubridge Press, 2022), 317pp, 128 colour plates, $99

Renowned designer David Trubridge has always demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and the environment in his work, whether in furniture, lighting or other media. The Other Way, a book of travel essays and photographs, allows him to articulate his ideas on these subjects in new ways.

The ‘other way’ of the title refers to Trubridge’s favoured travel itinerary: if a place attracts ‘teeming crowds’, he will instinctively go the other way, to the land. ‘Humans once had a close and balanced relationship with all the natural world around them’, he writes. ‘This instinctive respect and empathy formed the basis of spirituality. I want to reclaim that spirituality and gently place it back where it belongs in the centre of our connection to the whole of “Life”.’ His desire to foreground nature—and his corresponding wariness of humanity, especially Westerners—characterises the book. It is deep ecology, a principled resistance to the instrumentalisation of the natural world.  [Read more…]

Short Stories, Big Pictures

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Iona Winter

Beats of the Pa’u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 152pp, $30; Peninsula by Sharron Came (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 256pp, $30

Maria Samuela, of Cook Islands descent, has an MA from the IIML, and her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. Beats of the Pa’u is her debut collection, told via a community of first and second generation Cook Islands New Zealanders, from the 1950s through to the present day. 

From start to finish, Beats of the Pa’u provides multiple points of view within its stories, often correlating in central themes, such as grief, immigration, and love. The clever use of shifting focus between protagonists also links us to another generation’s experiential history. With apparent ease, these stories straddle worlds of religion, shame, compliance, tradition, and how younger generations often strive to embrace alternate identities. Samuela excels at showing lived experience and, with an intimate knowledge of her culture underpinning each story, she draws us in whilst also evoking compassion and laughter. [Read more…]