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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Physics of Fiction

April 1, 2022 1 Comment

Chris Else

Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press, 2021), 268pp, $35

When I was fifteen I discovered the joys of mathematics. The experience was a Damascene moment that confirmed me on a path to study science despite my love of language and story. I found, however, that when I got to university all my friends were arts students. Many of them felt that science was an arcane business somehow inimical to the things they cared about. How could I want to write poetry and short stories while at the same time attending lectures in maths and physics? For my part, I was mystified by their mystification. The pleasure I found in an elegant piece of logic was aesthetic and the ideas of science seemed a fertile field of metaphor. For example, the paradoxical square root of minus one, represented by the symbol i and the basis for the system of imaginary numbers, called to my mind the I of personal consciousness and identity, which seemed equally strange and inexplicable.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature

A Stubborn Kind of Integrity

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Enough Horizon: The life and work of Blanche Baughan by Carol Markwell (The Cuba Press, 2021), 324pp, $40

Logs, at the door, by the fence; logs, broadcast over the paddock;

Sprawling in motionless thousands away down the green of the gully,

Logs, grey-black. And the opposite rampart of ridges

Bristles against the sky, all the tawny, tumultuous landscape

Is stuck, and prickled, and spiked with the standing black and grey splinters,

Strewn, all over its hollows and hills, with the long, prone, grey-black logs.

—from ‘A Bush Section’, B.E. Baughan (1870–1958)   [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history

The Outrageous and the Everyday

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Kerry Lane

The Pink Jumpsuit: Short fictions, tall truths by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 134pp, $35 

The Pink Jumpsuit is the latest book by Emma Neale, one of the best-known writers working in Aotearoa today. Neale’s previous work includes six novels and six collections of poetry, and too many awards and honours to list here. Her flash and short fiction has also been widely published and acclaimed, but this is the first time these small pieces—short fictions and tall truths, as the subtitle describes them—have been gathered into a collection.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, short stories

Prating in Alien Tongues 

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

ināianei/now by Vaughan Rapatahana (Cyberwit, 2021), 170pp, $25; Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith (The Cuba Press, 2022), 86pp, $25

Among those who care about poetry in Aotearoa, Vaughan Rapatahana should be known particularly for two things. First, he is the most daring poet we have when it comes to seasoning his work with sesquipedalian lingo (that is, million-dollar words). Second, he has a more developed practice than anyone else when it comes to writing translingual poems in te reo Māori and English. His new collection, ināianei/now, offers plenty of examples of both modes, in poems that explore our fractured geopolitics, the dispossession and cultural losses of Māori, and the experience of dividing a life between different countries, as Rapatahana does. [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

Between the Long and the Short of It

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Craig Gamble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 478pp, $35

‘Maybe I could sew my legs together,’ Loretta muses, wishing for a tail. Penned-on lines or her own rashy, eczematic skin could pass for scales. Sniffing, dripping, allergy-ridden Jeremy is a likely candidate for the required slimy hagfish; a sickening Mrs Wilberforce (a nod to Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain) is Loretta’s longed-for mermaid kindred spirit. This is the alarming, yet vividly drawn cast of ‘Scales, Tails and Hagfish’, Octavia Cade’s story of an insistent, angry, self-proclaimed mermaid that sets the pace for this collection of fourteen long short stories with unflagging brio.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, sci fi fantasy, short stories

Facing Last Things

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Harry Ricketts

The Mermaid’s Purse by Fleur Adcock (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 80pp, $25

The arrival of a new collection from Fleur Adcock (her nineteenth) is a red-letter day. Here are fifty-one fresh opportunities to encounter that very distinctive voice: ironic, reflective, sometimes affectionate, sometimes teasing, still mulling over life’s absurdities and their capacity to intrigue and appal. Adcock, as she puts it in ‘Magnolia Seed Pods’, is still ‘carry[ing] on as I’ve always done: / picking things up and looking at them’, and continuing to fix our attention with her findings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: poetry

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