Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Massive Miscreants in Outer Space

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Craig Cliff

Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 208pp, $35

Alba, Drew and Stanley are three giants on the spacecraft Audition hurtling we know not where at the start of Pip Adam’s newest—and strangest—novel.

In her acknowledgements section, Adam writes: ‘This book is about the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system. In my personal life I am committed to this end and believe an urgent and imperative part of this work is Land Back in the hands of rightful owners.’ For those readers, like me, who read the acknowledgements first, or to anyone who has heard, seen or read an interview with Adam to accompany the release of Audition, such statements build the expectation that this will be a polemical book. [Read more…]

The Tyranny of the Image

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Elizabeth Heritage

The Words for Her by Thomasin Sleigh (Lawrence & Gibson, 2023), 288pp, $30

The Words for Her, Thomasin Sleigh’s third pakimaero or novel, takes the current moral panic about smartphones and turns it into a Covidesque real global crisis.

The premise is that people all around the world have started ‘going out’—disappearing from photos and video, and becoming unfilmable. Society starts to collapse as the ‘gaps’ (people who have gone out) become more and more numerous. The ‘presents’ (people who have not gone out) start photographing everyone around them compulsively. Cult leaders emerge and governments crack down. [Read more…]

The Past Is Heavy Only If You Hold On To It

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Rachel O’Connor

Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan (Huia Publishers, 2022), 232pp, $25

Fiction, Albert Camus is often quoted as saying, is the lie through which we tell the truth, and the short stories in this collection are an excellent illustration of this literary adage. Though the author has presented the intertwining episodes as fiction, the raw truths they convey and the ample evidence they contain of a hard-lived life make highly convincing reading, and the prevailing, sometimes painful sense of authenticity within the stories is ably underpinned by the clarity and immediacy of their predominantly Japanese and New Zealand locations, delivered always with atmosphere, and enriched by spare, telling touches of detail. [Read more…]

Sealed-Up Doors, Boarded-Up Buildings

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Robert McLean

Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My year in the Waikato by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books, 2023), 150pp, $38

The islands that would become Aotearoa New Zealand were the last habitable land masses to be settled by humans. And this newness of land remains palpable. In coastal Waikato you can almost feel the birth pangs squeezing the roiling damp life out of the earth as the reclaiming ocean seethes nearby. It is almost unbearably intense.

Inland are the towns Richard von Sturmer visited over the course of a year, and that he writes about in his travelogue Walking With Rocks, Dreaming With Rivers—Beeville, Morrinsville, Kihikihi, Taupiri, Putaruru, Kakepuku, Tokanui, Maniapoto, Tokahaere, Te Kūiti, Huntly and more. [Read more…]

The Sea Holds Our Dreams

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Michelle Elvy

Soundings: Diving for stories in the beckoning sea by Kennedy Warne (Massey University Press, 2023), 238pp, $39.99

In this book, Kennedy Warne engages the reader with stories both above and below the surface, taking us through highlights from his experiences as a writer for National Geographic and New Zealand Geographic. These reminiscences move around the globe, from the middle of the Indian Ocean to the Agulhas Current; from the Philippines to the Gulf of Arabia to the Okavango Delta (his only freshwater assignment). And in Aotearoa New Zealand, from Fiordland to the Bay of Islands.  [Read more…]

There Is No Stranger Place Than A Family

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David Eggleton

James K. Baxter: The selected poems edited by John Weir (Te Herenga Waka University Press, Cold Hub Press, 2023), 332pp, $40; Travels in Eclectia by Andrew M. Bell (Bigger Than Ben Hur Productions, 2020), 332pp, $56; From the Fringe of Heaven: Titirangi Poets edited by Piers Davies, Ron Riddell, Amanda Eason and Gretchen Carroll (Printable Reality, 2022); Famdamily: Meow Gurrrls (The Meow Gurrrls Collective, 2023), 40pp, $15; My Thoughts Are All of Swimming by Rose Collins (Sudden Valley Press, 2022), 100pp, $25; te pāhikahikatanga / incommensurability by Vaughan Rapatahana (Flying Island Books, 2023), 134pp, $10; Marcellus Wallace’s Dirty Laundry by David Beach (David Beach, 2021), 64pp, $25

Poets, in making poems, long to use words so as to explain, to expatiate, to justify and absolve our human predicament. None more so than James K. Baxter, who, as this new Selected Poems attests, remains one of the most able practitioners of poetry that New Zealand has produced. He’s also one of its most articulate and prolific writers, as the ten volumes of his Collected Works: Poems, Prose, Letters, published over the past ten years by Te Herenga Waka University Press and also edited by John Weir, attest (there are other works, such as plays, remaining to be added to this assemblage). In his memoir, Out of the Jaws of Wesley, Peter Olds records Baxter telling him: ‘They’ll etch on my tomb—at last, his mouth is mute.’ [Read more…]