Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

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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Reflections in a Golden Eye

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Paul Sharrad
Quinine, Kelly Ana Morey (Huia Publishers, 2010) 315 pp., NZ$35.00.

When I was a teenager living in Port Moresby, my parents decided we would take our allotted leave in New Zealand. Full of touristic bonhomie, we chatted to a taxi driver who asked where we were from. ‘Papua’, we replied breezily. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is that North Island or South?’ Once we realised what he was on about, we explained. ‘Oh yairs,’ came the rejoinder, ‘I knew you was from the tropics; you’ve got the yeller look about yer.’ So our sense of being part of a broad Pacific community was stripped away by parochial focus and our healthy suntans reduced to a medical routine of fighting off malaria with jaundice-inducing pills. These two elements frame the recent novel Quinine.
            Once Papua New Guinea gained its independence in 1975 it began to fade from the consciousness of Australians and others who made a living there as missionaries, planters, international advisers on everything and colonial administrators. The number of non-indigenous writers producing fiction set there also dwindled. Ex-colonials like Randolph Stow (Visitants, 1979) produced some good novels — after the usual slather of colonial romance twaddle, although that influence persisted in works like Louis Nowra’s postcolonial dystopian Palu (1987). Australian freelance traveller Trevor Shearston turned a critical eye on colonial officers and missionaries in Something in the Blood (1979) and White Lies (1986). Other sojourners have turned out books based on their experience there — for example Inez Baranay with her Rascal Rain (1994) — but overseas audiences have largely lost interest in the region, unless some crisis in the news, such as the Bougainville secessionist conflict or intertribal warfare in the Solomons, gives a novel topical appeal — as with Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip.
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Renaissance Man

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Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
            Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

            Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
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Classic Review from 1960, by Ruth Dallas

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Ruth Dallas
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 56, published in 1960 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. The review is by Ruth Dallas, who discusses Australian short-stories.


Coast to Coast, Australian Stories 1957-58. Selected by Dal Stivens. Angus and Robertson. 21S. West Coast Stories, edited by H. Drake-Brockman. Angus and Robertson. 20S.

If a New Zealand reader had no other Australian book on his shelves than these two collections of short stories, he would still be face to face with the abundance, freedom and assurance of the Australian short story, in comparison with the scarcity and nervousness of our own. The more Australian short stories I read, the more I am impressed by the relaxed and unselfconscious manner of the Australian short-story writer, when he is at his best. I should go so far as to say that if a New Zealand short-story writer were to neglect the study of the Australian story, it would be equivalent to neglecting the study of our own; it might even be more serious; for across the Tasman they are bringing in a fine harvest from land that with us is still being cleared. This is not meant to imply that good work has not been done here, as it has, of course, and is still being done; nothing could replace our own; but there is not very much of it; the Australian work is at once a rich addition and a challenge. These collections give an isolated, but very fair illustration of the kind of story Australian writers are winning from situation and character similar to our own (so like, and yet so unlike), and the use that is being made of the language of city and bush. Most of the stories are about ordinary folk, working men and women, coal-miners, gold-miners, farmers, new Australians, fishermen, housewives, mill-workers, teachers. The reader becomes aware of heat, fine-weather, space, and, most of all, of life lived out-of-doors. There is no story with sufficient poetic depth to amaze the reader or to wake a change in his mind, with the power of great art; but the Australian story is in a very healthy state; it is from this kind of abundance and ease that great writing at last emerges.
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