Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

A Matter of Judgement

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Chris Else

Slow Down, You’re Here by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence and Gibson, 2022), 206pp, $25

I am not sure how to tackle this review. I am tempted to call a spoiler alert because it is impossible to discuss this novel in any depth without giving away a plot twist that the reader deserves to experience without warning, as I did. On the other hand, if I assume my audience consists only of people who have already read the book then maybe I don’t need to talk about the plot at all. This, though, will make for a review that would be incoherent to other potential readers. It seems therefore that my ideal audience is people who are curious about the book but don’t actually intend to read it. I hope there aren’t many of you for I think this is an interesting novel that asks some serious questions and deserves to be read despite some stylistic quirks that I found irritating. [Read more…]

Lines of Defence

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Victor Billot 

Gorse Poems by Chris Holdaway (Titus Books, 2022), 72pp, $25; The Stupefying by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 88pp, $25

Chris Holdaway (b. 1989) belongs to a new generation of New Zealand poets by demographic. He is set apart from his peers by his distinctive style and his role as publisher and printer of poetry. As founding editor of Minarets journal and co-founder of Compound Press, Holdaway has produced a substantial number of publications, which provides an intriguing angle in consideration of his own writing. It is a thread back to New Zealand poet/printers of previous eras as well as a contemporary link to the world of DIY indie music and zine production (although it must be said his production standards are well above the norm). This is his first full-length collection, but Holdaway has previously produced a chapbook, has been widely published in New Zealand and overseas, and is a MFA graduate of the Notre Dame creative writing programme. The back of the book features insightful words from his former teacher, the remarkable American poet Joyelle McSweeney, as well as New Zealand poet Michael Steven. So, this is a ‘debut’ that perhaps carries more weight than many first collections.  [Read more…]

Listening to Our Elders

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Gina Cole

Haare Williams: Words of a kaumātua by Haare Williams (Auckland University Press, 2019), 260pp, $49.99; Tree Sense: Ways of thinking about trees edited by Susette Goldsmith (Massey University Press, 2021), 256pp, $37

Two insightful books of wisdom, beauty and knowledge from the elders. The first is a collection of poetry and prose steeped in mātauranga Māori; the second is an anthology of essays, art and poetry about trees in Aotearoa. Both are well-written, engaging and compelling.

Haare Williams: Words of a kaumātua is a collection of writing introduced and edited by Witi Ihimaera, who describes Williams as ‘one of our greatest elders, a singular bellbird among our native language speakers’, ‘the Grandfather Moses’ of Māori literature and ‘one of New Zealand’s leading changemakers’. It is evident from Ihimaera’s introduction and to all those who walk in te ao Māori that Williams is a kaumātua of great mana and knowledge, a sought-after orator, teacher and creative.  [Read more…]

Revolution Matters

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Philip Matthews

Jumping Sundays: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, 2022), 408pp, $49.99

Nick Bollinger’s rich new history of New Zealand counterculture, Jumping Sundays, is named for the initially spontaneous weekly occupations or liberations of Albert Park in Auckland in the distant spring of 1969. Bollinger paints a picture and it is bucolic and innocent, like a scene from Tolkien: ‘A rock band played on the rotunda. Some people held hands, some danced alone, some sat under trees with guitars, flutes and bongos and made music of their own. They wore kaftans, ponchos and leather-fringed jerkins, floppy hats, headbands, beads and flowers’. It seems at first to be an unthreatening, inclusive and pleasant local imitation of similar scenes that unfolded a year or two earlier in less sedate countries, but there are police keeping watch on the edges of the park. [Read more…]

Of Magpies and Mountains

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Gina Cole

Butcherbird by Cassie Hart (Huia, 2021), 356pp, $25

Cassie Hart’s supernatural thriller Butcherbird won the 2022 Sir Julius Vogel Award for best novel. Hart has previously self-published novels and novellas as well as short fiction under pen names J.C. Hart and Nova Black. Butcherbird is her first work published by Huia. It is a project Hart worked on as a participant of Te Papa Tupu, a writers’ incubator designed for emerging Māori writers. Hart writes speculative fiction and paranormal romance, and Butcherbird sits more towards the supernatural, horror, suspense side of speculative fiction. It is set in rural Taranaki where Hart grew up and, fittingly, Taranaki Maunga features as a guardian-like presence in the book, watching over events as they slowly unfold in the narrative.  [Read more…]

Platonic Models

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Harry Ricketts

Next: Poems 2016–2021 by Alan Roddick (Otago University Press, 2022), 82pp, $27.50; Night School by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, 2022), 84pp, $25; Sonnets for Sio by Scott Hamilton (Titus Books, 2022), 74pp, $25.

All poems contain their own platonic notion of poetry: that is, what a poem is or can be, and how it might behave. So, Paradise Lost embodies a particular version of the epic. The Waste Land embodies a certain version of the modern poem just after the First World War. A hundred years later, Rebecca Hawkes’s ‘Pink fairy armadillo’, say, or James Brown’s ‘War and Design’, Ruby Solly’s ‘Behold the line’, Chris Tse’s ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ each (in its distinctive way) embodies a particular version of what—here, now—poetry is or might be. I don’t mean that this platonic notion is necessarily part of the poet’s consciousness in writing the poem (although in some instances, such as Paradise Lost and The Waste Land, it obviously is). If, as Auden wittily proposed, poems read us, it is also the case that they read themselves. And, in doing so, they adumbrate certain ideas about the nature of poetry. 

The same is true of poetry collections. Alan Roddick’s Next: Poems 2016–2021, for instance, presupposes poetry as something readily accessible, a verbal machine that preserves and presents experiences and feelings in such a way that any reader can imaginatively enter into them. [Read more…]