Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Woman and Her Time

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Karin Warnaar

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected fiction by Greville Texidor (Victoria University Press, 2019), 304 pp., $30

There’s a story in this collection of short fiction by Greville Texidor called, simply, ‘Elegy’. That it’s set in an actual country churchyard appeals disproportionately to my sense of humour, as does the story itself, which is an arch observation of the bohemian left in mid-twentieth century New Zealand, with a possible whiff of Glover’s magpies. Another line from Thomas Gray’s poem could be applied to Texidor: the one about the flowers that blush unseen. Texidor’s literary bloom was brief and barely acknowledged at the time, but literature has a lot of one-hit wonders. [Read more…]

Crawling Through Brambles of History

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Arihia Latham

The Wild Card by Renée (The Cuba Press, 2019) 246pp., $35

I have a sister who was adopted. It was this unspoken thing, mostly. It was a fact that shimmered behind her eyes. The way she looked at me, our younger brother and our dad, the way she would shut down and simmer with feelings I couldn’t fathom. I went with her to meet her birth father when I was fourteen and she was nineteen. It was pretty tough. I think we had both hoped it would ease the tension in her bones but it didn’t. Something between us unravelled after that; I felt a disconnect in my sister, a resignation that floored the family house with hardwood. Reading The Wild Card by the matriarch of New Zealand literature, Renée, is like being let under the floorboards of genealogical trauma, crawling through brambles of history till we come out into the uncomfortable glare of the opening-night lights of the present. [Read more…]

Dystopia in a Time of Dystopia

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Gina Cole

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy: Volume 1 edited by Marie Hodgkinson (Paper Road Press, 2019), 194pp., $30

An unabashed Queer Pasifika Indiginerd geek, I am sitting in alert-level four lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic and reviewing a science fiction/fantasy anthology. The irony is that fate has placed me within a narrative found in dystopian fiction as I read dystopian fiction. I keep picturing the meme doing the social-media rounds, of a ginger cat sitting on an empty bookshelf in a bookstore, the caption: ‘Postapocalyptic books have been moved to current affairs.’ This riff on our real-world rupture speaks to the ever-shifting nature of speculative fiction categories, while the cat is the epitome of a smug opportunist sitting in the little warm footprints left behind by migrating books. [Read more…]

Cerebral Punch

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Siobhan Harvey

Friday Prayers by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press, 2019), 40pp., $19.50; By the Lapels by Wes Lee (Steele Roberts, 2019), 76pp., $25; Neon Daze by Amy Brown (Victoria University Press, 2019), 143pp., $25; Moral Sloth by Nick Ascroft (Victoria University Press, 2019), 80pp., $25

Tony Beyer’s Friday Prayers proves the truth of that old adage: big things come in small packages. A chapbook, forty pages and five poems long perhaps, but therein lies such mastery of concept, language, form and evocation that it seems larger and longer, packing more cerebral punch than the sum of its parts.

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‘All art comes from the depths of one’s feelings’

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Michael Dunn

Louise Henderson: From life, edited by Felicity Milburn, Lara Strongman and Julia Waite (Auckland City Art Gallery/Christchurch City Art Gallery, 2019), 256pp., $65

At one time, in the mid-1950s, Louise Henderson was a prominent figure among painters based in Auckland. In fact, she was seen as a modernist; she had associated with John Weeks in Auckland and later studied in Paris with Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), a Cubist painter, teacher and writer. Henderson had changed her earlier style, learnt in Christchurch, for a more abstract and Cubist-influenced approach. She exhibited at the Auckland Art Gallery alongside Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich, both of whom were some twenty years her junior. She was highly regarded by collectors and critics, such as Charles Brasch and Eric McCormick. But by the 1970s her star had waned, and although she continued to paint and exhibit into the 1980s she was no longer seen as a leading contemporary painter. Auckland Art Gallery staged an important show of her work called Louise Henderson: The Cubist years, curated by Christina Barton in 1992, and in 1993 Henderson was made a Dame. Henderson has, however, still not been accorded her full due as a painter and teacher. Louise Henderson: From life and the accompanying exhibition aim to redress the situation. [Read more…]