Landfall

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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By Word of Mouth

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Stories Without End: Essays 1975–2010, Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books, 2009), 424 pp., $49.99

i.m. Dame Judith Binney, DNZM, FRSNZ,

1.7.1940–15.2.2011

Weighing in at a substantial 1.2 kilogrammes, this solid volume carries within its wrist-twisting four hundred plus pages, the freight of a lifetime’s scholarship. Reviewing it now, a few weeks after Judith Binney’s early death at seventy – when she might easily have worked on fruitfully for another decade – it is difficult to avoid a valedictory note in a review that should legitimately be solely concerned with the text itself, a work that must now earn its keep independently of its author’s life, or death. That said, it will be necessary – and fitting – at the conclusion of this article to utter a poroporoaki in Te Reo Māori, the language of the world she set out to map some forty years ago. And it is the connection between the concept of oral history and its relation to the written word – a linkage that is central to Binney’s project – that will be the necessary focus here.

The book is a chronological series of collected articles that trace her intellectual development, through a Pākehā revision of Māori histories from 1975 until 2010. It begins with a close examination of missionary lives, goes on to discuss Māori Christianity, the rise of Te Kooti and Tūhoe prophets, Tūhoe and the land, oral histories and women’s stories. In what must surely now be seen as something of a Festschrift in her honour, the collection begins with a 1975 paper revealing the Rev. William Yates’ homosexuality, and his inner torments in attempting to reconcile his evangelical faith with a prediliction for Māori boys. The Māori Renaissance and the parallel rise of a new generation of Pākehā baby-boom historians began to coalesce at the time of these early publications. Binney was taught by Keith Sinclair, and while born in 1940 – and so not exactly in the same cohort as James Belich, Matthew Wright and Paul Moon – she is charged with the power of the same deconstructive zeitgeist that actively dethroned old Pākehā ‘saints’ while resurrecting and sanctifying many old Māori ‘sinners’.

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Touching Earth

April 1, 2011 1 Comment

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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