Landfall Review Online

The Women Who Knew Too Much

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Brannavan Gnanalingam

Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti (Penguin Random House NZ, 2019), 20, 336pp, $36

A common critique of superhero narratives is their inherent fascist tendencies. Superheroes exist in dysfunctional societies, and their powers necessarily exist outside of the law. Obviously, this is because the law in their world is corrupt and those with power can’t be trusted. The superheroes’ vigilantism becomes a way of restoring some sort of moral equilibrium. In many superhero narratives, the consequence of this vigilantism is largely skirted over: writer and reader generally assume, to borrow a line from Dylan, that ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest’. [Read more…]

Not a Capture but a Lavishing

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Janet Newman

By Sea Mouths Speaking: Collected poems 1973–2018 and related prose by Denys Trussell (Brick Row, 2019), 784pp, $75

It is hard to remember the time when human entanglement with the environment was not at the forefront of our minds. Yet only forty years ago, Denys Trussell’s ecological sequence of poems ‘Dance of the Origin’ was ‘outside the dominant view’ of New Zealand contemporary dance, for which it was written. The performance of Trussell’s poetic sequence explored ‘the body as nature; the body as ecological entity within larger ecological processes’, says Origins Dance Theatre founder Alison East, in an essay in this collection – ideas which in 1980 contrasted with ‘the dominant view of human beings as separate from and superior to all aspects of nature’ (532). [Read more…]

Going All Houdini

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Diane Brown

The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2019), 146pp., $27.99

Reading Frankie McMillan’s The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions is like taking part in a speed dating evening. You only have five minutes to meet the fifty-five applicants. All are equally fascinating and equally elusive. If only, you think to yourself, I could spend half an hour reading each one, delving deep to find out if any is a wife beater or an alcoholic.

It was probably a mistake to read this book after rereading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and then, Olive Again. At first, I resisted the slickness of McMillan’s small fictions that never allowed such close encounters with character and background. But nothing is more annoying than the reviewer who says ‘Why didn’t the writer write it like this?’ or ‘It would have better if she’d done this.’ There is a world of difference between Stout’s connected short stories set in one small town, and McMillan’s fictions, which roam from unspecified locations to Rotorua, Lake Bunyonyi, Ireland, Amsterdam, Ukraine and a myriad of other places. [Read more…]

Copy That

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines

Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media by Jacob Edmond (Columbia University Press, 2019), 346pp., US$64.99

Ezra Pound’s famous maxim ‘Make it new!’ was not new at all; Pound acquired the idea, whether advertently or inadvertently, from a Chinese Confucian scholar, who passed it on to an Emperor … The questions: What is original? What is a copy? What is new? are core to modernity and yet, as Frederick Jameson wrote and Jacob Edmond discusses in Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media, there is nothing new that does not have antecedents. So the compound question arises: when is ‘the new’ also a copy or, more specifically here, an ‘iteration’ of what has gone before, and how does this inform creative practice and statements of identity? [Read more…]