Landfall Review Online

Three Seas

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Emer Lyons

Bird Collector by Alison Glenny (Compound Press, 2021), 88pp, $25; The Sea Walks into a Wall by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2021), 94pp, $24.99; Sea-light by Dinah Hawken (Victoria University Press, 2021), 59pp, $25

The sea is thought to resonate with writers from islands. These three books engage with the ebb and flow of nature, social and environmental.

Bird Collector by Alison Glenny opens with a blank page. She allows the white of the page to welcome, ‘like / opening a drawer at random and finding snow’ (11). This is followed by the words of Emma Neale and Erik Kennedy, which frame the collection: Neale reads the ‘Victorian composer’ while Kennedy hears ‘a formidable antiquarian scholar’. Bird Collector is adorned with illustrations by Carrie Tiffany. [Read more…]

Allusions to the Apocalypse

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Chris Else

I Laugh Me Broken by Bridget van der Zijpp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021) 261pp, $30; Driftdead by Mike Johnson (99% Press, 2020), 498pp, $35

In recent years, New Zealand writing has developed a strong relationship with Germany, and Berlin in particular. The Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency is partly responsible for this. A biennial programme established in 2000, it has taken half a dozen writers, including Lloyd Jones, Hinemoana Baker and Philip Temple, for sojourns of up to eleven months in the German capital. Some, such as Sarah Quigley, seem never to have returned. Others, like Catherine Chidgey and the late Nigel Cox, have written about Berlin outside of the residency. The latest of these is Bridget van der Zijpp, whose novel Laugh Me Broken is mostly set in the city. [Read more…]

Frames of Reference, Particular & Personal

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Genevieve Scanlan

Sparks Among the Stubble by John Weir (Cold Hub Press, 2021), 88pp, $28; Meeting Rita by Jenny Powell (Cold Hub Press, 2021), 80pp, $27.50; Locals Only: An outsider’s insider perspective on Aotearoa by Craig Foltz (Compound Press, 2020), 108pp, $25

The back cover of Sparks Among the Stubble describes John Weir as ‘a priest as well as a poet’. In this, his fifth collection of poetry, Weir’s two vocations are undoubtedly entwined. The title is taken from scripture: ‘He has tested them like gold in a furnace … When the time comes for his visitation they will shine and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.’ What these verses mean to Weir is open to inference, and it quickly becomes clear that this poetic homily will not be a dour one. Weir’s poetry places equal thematic emphasis on the ways people are ‘tested’ and the way they ‘shine’. [Read more…]

Far Flung and Furthermore

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Robert McLean

Towards Compostela: Walking the Camino de Santiago by Catharina van Bohemen (The Cuba Press, 2020), pp., $38; Prague in My Bones by Jindra Tichy (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 344pp., $45

Travel books work best for me when the narrator, the reader’s guide or travel companion, is the kind of personality with whom one would like to travel in the real. Robert Byron, through whose Road to Oxiana I have wandered many times in the company of its wry, bewildered, self-deprecating author, is one such fellow traveller. A strain of empathy deriving from mutual misunderstanding—a generous and good-humoured accommodation of difference—is the hallmark of Byron’s encounters with people of all stripes, often in the most discommodious locales. So, too, one never gets the sense that he is appropriative or selective in his passages through Elsewhere; rather, he is at once discerning and appreciative. And what I need from a travel companion I need from a literary one, too. [Read more…]

A Danger to Herself and Others

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Catherine Robertson

Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan (Hachette, 2020), 344pp, $34.99

The 1970s was a bumper decade for serial killers. Despatching people with regularity were, in the US, the Hillside Strangler, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy; and in Britain, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Trevor Hardy and Fred and Rosemary West. Five out of those last six were operating in the North of England. In calling her debut novel Toto Among the Murderers, Sally Morgan can hardly be accused of hyperbole. There were plenty to go around. [Read more…]

A Quiet Joy

March 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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

Jacinta Ruru

From the Centre: A writer’s life by Patricia Grace (Penguin, 2021), 304pp, $40

I knew I would adore this book even before I first held it. I am not an impartial reviewer. Patricia Grace has loomed large in my life since my high school English teacher first shared some of Grace’s writing with us. This was my lightbulb moment growing up. It was the first time I had read Māori stories about Māori families, and they motivated me to learn more about the resilience of Māori in the face of colonisation and racism. [Read more…]