Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Touching Earth

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Lindsay Pope
How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging, Pat White (Victoria University Press, 2010) 239 pp., $35.00


The eye, the ear,
The mind in action,
these I value.
– Heraclitus, from Fragments
 
In 2009, as a member of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters Writing for the Page group, I had the privilege of previewing many of the initial drafts of the essays which form the substance of White’s How the Land Lies. A year later it’s a pleasure to see these collected to form a cohesive record of a man’s personal journey, offering the opportunity to immerse oneself in another’s fascinating mindscape.

            While each of these seventeen essays has a central topic – from music, to dam building, to fishing, to heroes — it is its echoes of family history, of a dislocated childhood, and of growth into self-aware maturity, that unify this work and the consciousness it displays. You are introduced to White’s world-view as it is now, which then leads back into the formative years: his recollection of childhood experiences on the South Island’s West Coast with all their anxieties and turbulence. But White is not so much concerned here with memoir, rather with attempts to get to the nucleus of the forces that have influenced and shaped him, and to locate the nub of things, a centre. He reflects on parents, on siblings, on communities, on relationships, on both Pakeha and Maori ways of telling stories of place. He comments on the many places he has lived, on his various means of employment, and on his personal struggles with physical health and psychological well-being.

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Trigger-happy

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David Eggleton
Brian Brake: Lens on the World, edited by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press,  2010) 352 pp., $99.99

Photojournalism is politics by other means, a form of persuasion, a type of propaganda, where photographs might proselytise on behalf of a world-view. Brian Brake (1927–88) was, as this book tells us, ‘New Zealand’s best-known photographer’, certainly during the latter part of his lifetime. But, as Athol McCredie, the book’s general editor, goes on to point out in his lucid and succinct introduction, though Brake had a successful international career and was a media legend in New Zealand, ‘the generation of “art” photographers who had emerged during his absence overseas largely ignored him’ — there is no School of Brian Brake, and meanwhile his images which once featured so prominently in international anthologies, such as Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s Thames and Hudson survey A Concise History of Photography, have disappeared from more recent authoritative publications, such as 2004’s Magnum Stories: Sixty-One Photographers (edited by Chris Booth for Phaidon).
            The Te Papa Brian Brake project, which combines this book selection of over 300 photographs and six essays – ranging from McCredie’s overview, to Lissa Mitchell’s examination of his early years, to Peter Ireland’s assessment of the best-seller New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (1963, revised edition 1973, new version 1990), to Damian Skinner’s revisionist reading of his museum and gallery object photographs — with a 2010 major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, also extends to include an ongoing online cataloguing of selected Brake images in an attempt to do justice to the critical mass of around 115,000 photographs that were donated by Brake’s partner Wai-man Raymond (Amau) Lau to the Museum in 2001. That donated collection in turn doesn’t quite encompass Brake’s entire oeuvre — things have gone missing over time. (Various originals of a number of key colour images are also missing from the book, represented instead by barely adequate magazine reproductions.)

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What Happens Next

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Lisa Samuels
Kingdom of Alt, Jack Ross (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010) 240 pp., $45.00


If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the serial agonistic airs of that work, but it is  more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection of tales and takes involved with relations between real-life events and imaginary fictions that score the traumas of those real lives. The narrators include variously: a twenty-or-so female university student, a thirtyish divorcee taking evening poetry classes and making freakish death films from video fragments, a middle-aged man, Jack Ross himself as the speaking author, and other, both fragmentary and unified, human-ish points of view.
            The book opens with ‘Trauma’, a compelling short story that lampoons the difficult-subject liberal university course, the traumatised people who take it, and the suiciding student who seems to be the inevitable result of that equation. The story is largely presented as a series of journal entries including marginal edits from the narrator. These edits tend towards smoothing out her self-presentation, so that the student will come across as nicer than her first-thought compositional impulses might indicate. Thus ‘correcting’ the university journal or essay is associated with self-editing as making nice. By extension, smoothing out and correcting writing – making ‘good’, finished art – is presented as a making-nice of the painful equations of human culture. Kingdom of Alt does not want to make nice in that way. The fictive framing of this story, as with others in this collection, is multiple: real-life journalism, psychological theory, an embedded story, and the draft composition journal bracket each other, while the tale moves toward its ‘resolution’ of sorrow and sympathetic incomprehension.

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How to Layer an Ensemble

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Siobhan Harvey
From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Vintage, 2011), 348 pp., $29.99

Clothes: whether it’s the beret worn by Anna Sergeevna in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, or the beige raincoat donned by the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to be an Other Woman’, or Nie Chuanqing’s ‘blue gown of lined silk’ in Eileen Chang’s ‘Love in a Fallen City’ (i), or the ‘dark mohair’ bristling at the nape of tragic heroine of Maurice Duggan’s ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’ (ii), the garb writers choose to dress their characters in not only offers the kind of detail that makes prose convincing and compelling, but resonates with thematic and symbolic effect.

Of course, like most literary motifs, clothes are binaries. Worn by characters to suggest inner emotions — their atmospheric and cerebral worlds — this clothing is also simultaneously put on by the writer each time he or she picks up a pen and begins to place words beside each other to flesh out, develop and refine the wearer. The notion of waning, venereal Flaubert donning Félicité’s dimity kerchief, red skirt, grey stockings and apron whilst penning his poignant short story ‘A Simple Heart’ in 1877, or love-struck but vilified Mikhail Bulgakov wearing the typist’s fil de Perse stockings in his satirical novel Heart of a Dog might amuse or appal, but figuratively speaking, during each text’s development, so it transpired.

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The Displaced Person

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Ian Wedde
Genji Monogatari, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2010) 60 pp., $14.95.  At Trotsky’s Funeral, Mark Young (Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2010) 44 pp., $45.00.  the allegrezza ficcione, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2006, 2007, 2008) 80 pp., $14.95

I first heard rather than read Mark Young’s poetry in the 1960s at Barry Lett Galleries and at the Wynyard Tavern in Auckland, where I was a student and had aspirations to be a poet. What was immediately striking about his poems then, and remains so now, was a quality of displacement. There seemed to be three sources of this displacement. The voice I heard (and the texts I later read) had a deliberating, impersonal quality, in marked (so to speak) contrast to the jongleur or troubadour voice of Dave Mitchell, who often performed with Young. Then, the language itself, in its internal (pronouns, subject/object relations, point-of-view) and external (line endings and enjambement, syllabic weight, visual scoring) exercised a persistently sceptical and frugal sense of affect. And finally, the references, even when local in terms of a scenography, seemed most often to have been mediated by distant influences and references – LeRoi Jones (‘Gonna roll the bones’): Black / gamin / disdains all games / of chance, Robert Duncan (‘The Tigers’): Within the tiger / reels a turmoil / of desires, William Carlos Williams (‘The intention’) (i) The intention is / that I / refurbish / the room – French poets (Verlaine), artists (Magritte), and jazz musicians (most often Miles Davis).
            To these effects one might add Young’s enjoyment, and deployment, of arcane words and concepts; in one poem, whose title I will footnote because of its length, he riffs across the following: belvedere, syzygny, xiphoid, ylang ylang, widdershins, giaour, anthropophagi, lucubration, pleonastic, adespota – pretty much for the hell and pleasure of it (ii) However this, like a certain asperity in Young’s tone, is less a measure of displacement than a trace of aloof character, a kind of impersonal personality – a placement or presence marked by its adroit discretion.

What this added up to could be described as negative romanticism: subjectivity identified by being uninterested in winning sympathy or affection; meaning declaring itself to be uninterested in conclusions, especially transcendent ones; a presence revealed in its preference for distorted mirror-images over face-to-face disclosure; an honest preference for sleight-of-hand over ‘honesty’; and, most importantly, the poet’s liking for fictions, unreliable science, a certain droll impassivity, a relish of coat-trailing narrative, a love of the playfully esoteric.

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