Landfall

The Past as Possibility

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

By the Green of the Spring by Paddy Richardson (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 312pp, $37.99; Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2022), 326pp, $37

A Listener review of The Luminaries charged Eleanor Catton with being ‘another New Zealand writer escaping into the past’. It’s true that many of our authors have been drawn to write at least one novel set in history, but with such variety of intent that the actual escape seems the least of their motives. There are novels that shed light on past injustice, both societal and individual; that give new life to voices marginalised or erased at the time; that aim to provide a more nuanced context for the present; or that simply can’t wait to share an absolute cracker of a tale. There are novels that are sweeping in scope and those that are intimate and personal. Some are based on scrupulous research, while others play fast and loose with the facts. The past is less a foreign country than an entire universe of possibility. [Read more…]

People Poems

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Airini Beautrais

Everyone is Everyone Except You by Jordan Hamel (Dead Bird Books, 2022), 69pp, $30; A Question Bigger than a Hawk by Jan FitzGerald (The Cuba Press, 2022), 72pp, $25; People Person by Joanna Cho (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 95pp, $30

Jordan Hamel is a performance poet as well as a poet for the page, having won the New Zealand Poetry Slam in 2018 and represented New Zealand at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, has strongly performative qualities. These poems interrogate their subject matter in ways that would be equally at home on page or stage: from the visceral horror of ‘Meat mannequin’ to the creepy kink of ‘Sex toy roadshow’, exploring 90s nostalgia, Christianity and Kiwi bloke culture along the way. The shock value in these poems doesn’t feel gratuitous, more part of a performance of introspection. How deep do we go before we come right out the other side, into something else? Perverseness seems an important part of the process. [Read more…]

Beyond Biography

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sarah Christie

Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The many histories of Charlotte Badger by Jennifer Ashton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 191pp, $35

At first glance, the life of Charlotte Badger does not seem an obvious choice as a subject for a biography. As author Jennifer Ashton describes, Badger was an ‘ephemeral, fleeting player in the story of modern New Zealand’. She left no first-person narratives of her life; previous accounts offer wildly different versions of significant events in her past and large parts of her story are irretrievable to us. Yet, it is Ashton’s keen eye for a good historical mystery and her ability to expertly weave together a multifaceted piece of writing—that also challenges what biography can be—that makes this both an expert piece of historical writing and a truly delightful read. [Read more…]

Resonant Deformations

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

Seasons by William Direen (South Indies Text & Music Publishing, 2022), 72pp, $22; Resonating Distances by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books, 2022), 150pp, $30; Breach by Lisa Samuels (Boiler House Press, 2021), 75pp, $28

William Direen’s Seasons prompted me to consider readerly expectations of access to a speaker’s inner world. A man spends a year in the remote Strath Taieri/Maniototo—inland and north of Ōtepoti Dunedin—but seemingly withholds his reasons for being there. Is he ‘taking time out’ or is he really there to engage with the region’s hot summers and winter snow? If it is the latter, which encompasses the entanglement of people, weather, land, and livelihood, shouldn’t this be sufficient?

Perhaps the description of the collection as a ‘poetry diary’ led this reader to expect access to the speaker’s ‘inner world’, to his perspectives on the events unfolding around him— seasonal and otherwise. [Read more…]

Plotting Pasifikafuturism

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

Na Viro by Gina Cole (Huia, 2022), 352pp, $35

Tia Grom-Eddy steers the carved kauri drua into the ocean current, the sail billowing and flapping above her. Wind in her face, the blue-black night sky alive with stars, she begins the long journey from Aotearoa along the Kermedec Trench and on, to the Lau archipelago, calling on the ancestral navigation skills that taught her ‘how to keep your body in tune with tides, flows, currents, animals, signs. The ways of her Fijian and Tongan and Mayuro ancestors, always guiding her.’ A few chapters on, Tia is using the same ancient methods of wayfinding to navigate another kind of drua, the Pawta, a huge, rock-like, voice-responsive, extra-terrestrial spaceship built by the inhabitants of far-away Thrae. Aboard the Pawta, she now rides the currents and swells of the mighty Tijen galactic whirlpool, in search of her sister, thought to be trapped in a tiny probe deep in the turbulent vortex. [Read more…]

Dawn Disservice

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean

Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia by Rowan Light (Otago University Press, 2022), 262pp, $50

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16 was intended to unlock indirectly the bloody attritional stalemate in Europe. Whilst not quite desperate, it was certainly risky. But the geo-strategic rewards of success could have eventually proved decisive for the Entente. So the New Zealand Expeditionary Force combined with its Australian counterpart to form the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) as part of the allied expedition sent to capture the Gallipoli peninsula and open the Dardanelles to the allied navies. The Ottoman adventure ended in abject failure: the invasion force was withdrawn after eight months of fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side. And the Western Front meat mincer kept grinding for another two years. But as part of what has come to be considered a murderous folly characterised by Churchillian grandiosity and bigoted incompetent command, desperate privation and selfless martyrdom or sacrifice, Australian and New Zealand forces fought their first major military action of World War I at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Over a century later, each country marks the anniversary to remember not only those who died at Gallipoli but all who have served their country in times of war. [Read more…]