Landfall Review Online

Edge-of-the-Ledge Reading

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Shaun Barnett

To the Mountains: A collection of New Zealand alpine writing selected by Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey (Otago University Press, 2018), 372 pp., $45

New Zealand is a mountainous land, so it’s hardly surprising that landscape often shapes our literature. Think of Mulgan’s protagonist Johnson, a fugitive traipsing through the Kaimanawa Ranges in Man Alone. But what of those who deliberately choose to go to the mountains: for exploration, for challenge, for rejuvenation?

Otago-based writers Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey have carefully selected material for To the Mountains, the only anthology of New Zealand alpine writing to appear in over three decades. Like the threads of a climbing rope, they blend historic writing with modern, vivid accounts of epic climbs with thoughtful contemplation, and the voices of men with women, Māori with Pākehā, children with adults. This is no random collection, but a considered compilation structured into four themes – ‘Approach’, ‘Climb’, ‘Epic’ and ‘Reflection’ – which mimic a mountaineer’s journey. [Read more…]

Macpherson’s Part in the City

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017 by Mary Macpherson with an essay by Gregory O’Brien (Mary Macpherson and PhotoForum Inc., 2018), 44 pp, $35

Designated as PhotoForum 89. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 29 May to 22 July 2018 as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange’s famous quote comes to mind as I open the pages of Mary Macpherson’s new photographic book, The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017.¹ Modestly sized, it presents 25 superbly coloured photographs of the city, and an essay by Gregory O’Brien. [Read more…]

He waka eke noa: We’re all in this together

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Anahera Gildea

Wayfinder by Jan FitzGerald (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017), 62 pp., $24.99; People from the Pit Stand Up by Sam Duckor-Jones (Victoria University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $30; Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $20

In modern parlance, the word waka is used to describe your vehicle, your mode of transport, your craft, but it also refers to your ancestral canoe and your tribe; it can be the word used to indicate a flight of birds, and it can be the medium for atua or spirits. These three collections of poetry may initially seem to have little in common, yet once inside, you realise you are in each case afloat on a waka, carefully navigated by a deft hand. Navigation itself is one of the key preoccupations of any sea people, and is an apt metaphor for all three of these books. Jan FitzGerald’s Wayfinder calls directly on ancestral connections, both animate and inanimate, to point the way; Sam Duckor-Jones ‘paddles out at dawn’; and Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau o Apanui, Ngāti Porou) uses the significant refrain ‘Am I navigating correctly?’ as an innocent question loaded with defiant barb. [Read more…]

Like Music, Like a Requiem

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Harley Hern

The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 362 pp., $30

Seventeen years after her highly praised debut novel Breakwater, Kate Duignan’s second novel, The New Ships, explores very different territory. Peter Collie is a model of reliability and responsibility, a Wellington lawyer in his late forties, financially stable, cautious and dependable. As a young man he once dismantled great ships piece by piece, but as the story begins it is Peter who is being pulled apart. His wife Moira has recently died, his grown son Aaron has absented himself, and Peter’s career and reputation are spiralling downwards. As the three epigraph poems suggest, paternity and grief are present from the first page of Chapter One. But Peter also revisits his past. Abigail, the baby daughter he lost, and Geneviève, the woman he once loved and abandoned, both haunt his thoughts. In addition, Peter uncovers a secret that, within this place of grief and loss, forces him to question his marriage, his life and his sense of self. Set mainly in New Zealand, but with action that navigates India and Pakistan, the UK and Europe, The New Ships is the story of Peter’s re-examination of his actions—or inactions—and of what it is to be a father, husband and son. [Read more…]

In Counterpoint to the Music of Time

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Aberhart Starts Here by Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2018), 136 pp., $39.99

This catalogue is based on the Christchurch Art Gallery show of Aberhart’s early work (1975 to 1983 with one picture from 1986), from when he was living in Lyttelton and later working as an instructor at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art at Ilam.

My initial thought was to wonder: have we got to a point when everything that can be written about Laurence Aberhart has been written? Can we squeeze one more review out of this gigantic stack of beautiful work that he has shored up against the crumbling ruins of our civilisation? [Read more…]