Landfall Review Online

Haunted

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

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

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

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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On O.E Middleton & Maurice Shadbolt

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

R.A. Copland
This month’s out of the archive post is a review if the short stories of O.E Middleton and Maurice Shadbolt by R.A. Copland from Landfall 56 (1960).

The New Zealanders, by Maurice Shadbolt (Gollancz, 1959), 18s. The Stone and Other Stories, by O.E. Middleton (The Pilgrim Press, 1959), 12S. 6d.

These stories of Maurice Shadbolt’s are so good in so many ways that it is a delight to read them. One is struck almost at once with the range of the author’s sympathies and understanding; for Mr Shadbolt is mercifully determined to be the author, not the subject, of his stories. In his first story, told in the first person, he presents the situation of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, groping towards love; and in another he has convincingly explored the plight of an aging man grasping back at love from the grave’s brink. There are women growing frantic as youth fades, boys who are blundering or brutal, Maoris and farmers, artists, poets, working men and business men. They are nearly all contemporary New Zealanders, and they behave and speak not merely in character, but to the point of the story.
Each of these stories has a planned meaning and direction. To illustrate this we may consider the shortest of them all, ‘Thank you Goodbye’. An episode is related with ease and the conversation and gestures are almost idly supplied, so that the ‘design’ (to employ a useful ambiguity), is tactfully involved in the detail. Yet it is the achievement of the story to get something painful and indeed tragic said about the present predicament of humanity in general, at the very moment when it is being most faithful to the particular crisis. It is this relevance of Mr Shadbolt’s stories which, when successfully managed, constitutes their distinction. He sees and shows us the wider allusion in the situations he has chosen. Actually I suspect that he sometimes proceeds the other way round, and from the wider idea works down to a representative case. It is clear, in any event, that he looks upon this country with an educated intelligence and with an awareness of its history as strongly developed as his observation of its forms and manners.

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Who Remembers the Barouder SE 5000?

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Richard Reeve
Fly Boy, by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Steele Roberts, 2010) 64 pp, $19.99

A poetry collection exhibiting a long-term obsession with planes, especially fighter-planes from World War II, planes, planes, and more generally, flight, Fly Boy is filled with evocative replications of Canterbury poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s basic, vigorous and deeply rooted song of boyhood, imaginative freedom and time past. A bit like Seamus Heaney’s nostalgic paeans to household items, Paparoa Holman’s poems show an art of linking vivid, musical phrases into small lyrical vignettes that read like private memorative recitations: revisitations of a formative aviation manual which the poet evidently pored over as a boy, meditations on birds and bird flight, pilot death, gliders, Antarctic Austers, Fokkers, Constellations, Vulcans, Barouders and Sunderlands.

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