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Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Hug Your Mother, Hold Her

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Fire by Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52pp, $37; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman (Otago University Press, 2021), 104pp, $27.50

What fire, indeed? This attractively printed collection with its fifty pages of poetry is prefaced with a quote from Volumnia, the honour-at-all-cost matron in Coriolanus: 

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire,
And then I’ll speak a little.

There is also a poem called ‘Volumnia’, with its lines: 

We had no use for history but Volumnia’s.
That woman against fire.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

The Killer Gene 

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 68pp, $24.99; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton (Otago University Press, 2022), 80pp, $25; Surrender by Michaela Keeble (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 130pp, $30

My only complaint about Tim Upperton’s work is that there is not enough of it. A Riderless Horse comes a full eight years after his last book, The Night We Ate the Baby, and, like that book and his first (A House on Fire in 2009), it has barely fifty pages of poems in it. But Upperton builds books like racing cars, without an unnecessary gram. In only thirty-two poems, we get full servings of hard-won wisdom and music and rue and pathos. In a recent interview, Upperton characterised A Riderless Horse as ‘a kinder, more reflective book’. Some of the strongest poems in the book seem to be evidence that this is true. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

Matrix of Shape-Shifting

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022), 392pp, $65

‘The Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea’, the late Moana Jackson writes in his foreword to the book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art. The book is based on the blockbuster exhibition of the same name presented by Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, between December 2020 and May 2021, which took over the entire Gallery building and also spilled out into areas in the downtown Britomart precinct. [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, maori and pacific

Parade of Humanity

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge by Rosemary Riddell (Upstart Press, 2021), 229pp, $39.99

‘What if we could be honest about our pain?’ asks film/theatre director and lawyer Rosemary Riddell in her memoir To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge. Not perhaps the question you’d expect from a judge, considering the usual preconceptions of the role.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: law, memoir

Writing Ourselves into Existence

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244

Laura Toailoa

Sweat and Salt Water: Selected works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa edited and compiled by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson and Terence Wesley-Smith (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 221pp, $40

How does one begin to describe the enormity of Teresia Teaiwa? How does one begin to describe the history of this great thinker, writer, teacher, activist and poet? How does one pay a worthy tribute to the woman who made us laugh and cry and feel and fight, in a place where too many Pasifika minds go to die? How does one begin? [Read more…]

Filed Under: essays, maori and pacific

Note to Self

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Wendy Parkins

Notes on Womanhood by Sarah Jane Barnett (Otago University Press, 2022), 169pp, $30; You Probably Think This Song is About You by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 223pp, $35

These two books, written from the vantage point of midlife, adopt different approaches to tell their stories. Sarah Jane Barnett’s Notes on Womanhood is the first in a new series from Otago University Press, Ka Haea Te Ata, that aims to cast light on issues of importance in Aotearoa today. It interweaves Barnett’s own experiences with a wide range of secondary research in order to bring the deeply personal into dialogue with broader cultural concerns and the structural inequities that shape women’s lives. Kate Camp’s book, by contrast, takes the form of linked essays, an increasingly popular mode in memoir writing, perhaps because it allows a writer the freedom to present relatively self-contained episodes from life, without the need to fill all the gaps that a single linear narrative might require. In both cases, though, the difficulties of growing up female are approached with candour, allowing readers the space to recognise or reflect on their own experiences.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: memoir

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