Landfall Review Online

Showing Us Around Oceania

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Vilsoni Hereniko
Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2010) 304 pp., $49.99

In Wendt’s 1976 essay ‘Towards a New Oceania’, he wrote the following about Oceania, of which Polynesia is a part: ‘So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.’[i] It is hard to believe that this influential essay was written thirty-five years ago because it is just as relevant today as it was then, when a cultural renaissance was beginning to spread throughout Oceania. Wendt was one of the major catalysts for the arts during this time, and his influence in fostering and encouraging poets to create and publish was just as intense then as it is today.
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Painted Words

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David Eggleton
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99

Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.

Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
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Haunted

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Jenny Powell
Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99

This is one of the few books I have had dreams about. The sea in it ended up permeating my nights: images of a blue-black seething ocean — repetitious, insistent images that are as compelling to the reader as they are to its characters — dominate Michele Powles’ first novel.

Weathered Bones weaves together the lives of three women, initially unacquainted but about to become closer than they ever could have imagined. Eliza McGregor arrives in Wellington in 1840. Despite her initial new-immigrant expectations, life soon plummets from joy to the depression of a lonely grind at Pencarrow lighthouse. Her husband drinks his earnings, and her young children exhaust her spirit. The husband’s eventual drowning leads to Eliza herself becoming the keeper of the light.

This is a fascinating aspect of the book, historically speaking, as ‘Eliza’ was inspired by the true-life story of Mary Jane Bennett, appointed New Zealand’s first keeper of a permanent lighthouse at Pencarrow in 1858. Powles allows us the opportunity to ponder the difficult life of Mary Jane, who was surely one of New Zealand’s early feminists.
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Time to Stop and Smell the Roses

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Sarah Jane Barnett
Slip Stream, by Paula Green (Auckland University Press, 2010), 80 pp., $24.95

How to lean the ladder against the wall or empty / the teapot or make a summer salad with heirloom tomatoes?’ How to carry on as normal while coping with breast cancer? Paula Green’s new collection, Slip Stream, is a brave look at this question. It details Green’s personal journey from the first hint of cancer, through biopsy, radiotherapy, and on to recovery. While the collection talks about her illness, it also asks: how can poetry capture such an experience?

Paula Green lives on the Auckland’s West Coast with her family. She has written four solo collections of poetry, and her previous work draws on food, cooking, art, music and colour. Green has also edited anthologies such as Best New Zealand Poems, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (with Harry Ricketts), and Flamingo Bendalingo, a collection written by Green and fifty children. Her writing has been called subtle and sophisticated; fluid and lyrical.
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Striding Towards God: The Long Afterlife of James K Baxter

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton
Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, edited by Paul Millar (Auckland University Press, 2010) $39.99, 297 pp.

James K. Baxter: Poems, selected and introduced by Sam Hunt (Auckland University Press, 2009), $29.99, 105 pp.

The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune, by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2009) $40.00, 224 pp.

On the cover of Paul Millar’s Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, the eponymous poet has been photographed as a man in a straitjacket: symbolically swaddled, restrained and repressed in his back-to-front overcoat — a rebel with a cause. From his beginnings as the infant prodigy, absorbing the recited lines of Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’ Shanter’[i] on his father’s knee, to the encyclopaedic poetry graphomania of his youth, to the soliloquising hairy phenomenon of the Jerusalem commune years, James K. Baxter (1926–1972) was always one who refused to pull his head in.

Born into a family of Scottish Calvinist dissenters settled in the Otago hinterland, and raised within a tradition of pacifism, socialism, and free-ranging intellectual enquiry, it was perhaps inevitable that the role of non-conformist — as gadfly, guru, prophet and martyr, of sorts — was one that the precocious Baxter would play to the hilt. (‘Better to err with Burns and Byron than fall in line with Brasch’, the teenage Baxter wrote to his pen-pal Noel Ginn.[ii]) But grandstanding and swashbuckling were merely aspects of Baxter’s contrarian methodology, and in John Newton’s work of social history — built on a diligent gathering of oral histories — Newton explores, and to an extent explains, how the poet’s adolescent alienation, suburban outrages and establishment antagonisms enabled him to move towards a pioneering radical activism that in turn helped to herald a new climate, a new populist mood, a sense of revolution.

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From Seek to Hide and Back Again

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Anne Kennedy
Fosterling, by Emma Neale (Random, 2010, $29.99)

I’ve read two New Zealand novels recently that have on their covers walls of dense bush with arch-shaped escape-routes in them, through which can be seen the light at the end of the tunnel. First, Patrick Evans’ superb, mimetic Gifted, and now this layered and original novel from Emma Neale, Fosterling. On the Neale cover, a tall, fuzzy, uncertain-looking man walks away from the camera, framed by the arch. But he is really walking toward us, the reader, Kiwis, living just beyond the bush. The New Zealand undergrowth, it seems, whether suburban or back-block, continues to deliver a range of fictive mysteries to us, from literary icons, to pig-hunting blokes, to tutus-and-gumboots, to the unlikely Tarzan Presley, to tall hairy beasts. These characters, the invention of the bush or of those who live alongside it, come shyly into the light.
In Fosterling, a yeti-like creature called Bu, seven feet tall and covered in a thick pelt of glossy hair, emerges from deep, dark South Westland bush. Initially mute, he inspires a media circus, but also draws out tenderness and compassion among the small group of people who try to protect and care for him. As Bu’s story unfolds, we learn to liken him to a sasquatch, to Big Foot, to a maero; he creates a connecting tissue of universal myth set here in New Zealand. And we wonder, mesmerisingly, where he came from and what will happen to him.
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