Landfall Review Online

In the Footsteps of Robin Hyde

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima (Massey University Press, 2020), 95pp, $45

The ghost of Robin Hyde shifts in the shadows of our history: poet, novelist, journalist; invalid, mother, drug addict; lady editor at the Wanganui Chronicle, war correspondent during the early months of the Sino-Japanese War in China. A dreamer, she wrote of herself, ‘and a lover’. Hyde, the pen name of Iris Guiver Wilkinson, stands tall in the New Zealand literary canon, but Wilkinson herself, Cape Town-born and immigrating to New Zealand when she was a baby, appears only dimly in the male-led literary world of the 1930s—a ‘trying thing’, wrote the acerbic Frank Sargeson, a ‘silly bitch’.¹ [Read more…]

Dick’s Pics

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, 2021), 312pp, $65

It goes without saying that Dick Frizzell is a very clever man with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Somehow, he has also survived half a century or so’s worth of New Zealand art-world vicissitudes, so inevitably his thoughts about art are going to be interesting. He is also (and this is not intended as an insult) a narcissist. You would have to have the balls to write your own history of world art, playing at being Kenneth Clark. You also must be a bit of a celebrity for a publisher to let you do it. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behold: Me, According to the History of Art. Frizzell does to art history what Tom Scott did to Charles Upham. [Read more…]

Sometimes Playful, Always Compelling

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Harry Ricketts

Nouns, Verbs, Etc: Selected poems by Fiona Farrell (Otago University Press, 2020), 211pp, $35

Fiona Farrell is one of those enviable writers equally adept at fiction, non-fiction and poetry, not to mention plays. She is perhaps best known for The Skinny Louie Book and, more recently, for The Quake Year and The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city, but her three intermittent poetry collections have also been eagerly awaited and read.

Selections from these three volumes—Cutting Out (1987), The Inhabited Initial (1999) and The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (2007)—plus poems from the essay collection The Broken Book (2011) are represented here in chronological order. Interspersed between these is a generous helping of uncollected poems, not arranged chronologically but, as Farrell says in her Preface, ‘loosely as they seemed to echo one another or share a common theme’. The result disrupts any attempt at an overly chronological or ‘developmental’ reading of the work. The poems are bracketed by the evocative Preface and by a series of fascinating Notes (some of which have already appeared with the separate volumes). It is an impressive ensemble: engaging, inventive, sometimes playful, always compelling. [Read more…]

Broken Threads

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Wendy Parkins

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 240pp, $39.99

Home is where we start from, to borrow a phrase from the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who in turn adapted it from T.S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’. According to Winnicott, we develop our sense of self in relation to others from earliest infancy. We seek connection, intimacy and reciprocity, and whether we find those vital qualities at home or not plays a determining role in the kind of self that begins there.¹ For Eliot, by contrast, home is where we start from, a fixed point of departure. Like the past, home is something we must leave behind, for good or ill, as we inevitably move into an unfamiliar and complicated world to discover ourselves out there. The ambivalence of that departure—a heroic striving or an expulsion?—haunts Eliot’s poem of beginnings and ends, past and present, gains and losses. [Read more…]

He Whakarite Ataahua/A Beautiful Arrangement

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Gina Cole

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: An anthology edited by Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris and James Norcliffe with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020) 250pp, $39.95

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre of 15 March 2019 and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that ‘We are all New Zealanders’, the editors of this anthology called for creative work that responded to life in contemporary New Zealand. The response wonderfully displayed in this collection was wide ranging and diverse. And after all, portraying range and diversity is the job of anthologies. In an article from a 2020 issue of the New Yorker, writer Clare Bucknell states:

Etymologically, ‘anthology’ refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force.¹ [Read more…]