Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

‘Just the Darkness and the Fire’

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Francis Cooke

No Other Place to Stand: An anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and essa ranapiri (Auckland University Press, 2022), 220pp, $29.99

No Other Place to Stand is a book that grapples, from its opening pages, with its existence. ‘Climate changes is so massive … that one wonders about the value of the particular, the specific, the local, the here, the now’, Alice Te Punga Somerville writes in her foreword. ‘What is the point of quietly—or even noisily—reading about climate change when the crisis in which we find ourselves demands action?’ [Read more…]

Poems as Memory 

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Arihia Latham

Sedition by Anahera Maire Gildea (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 150pp, $30; A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau by Briar Wood (Anahera Press, 2022), 85pp, $30

Ka maumahara te awa.
The river is memory,
Letters and feathers swim it,
(‘Channelling Rongo’ by Briar Wood)

If water is our memory, its every iteration has existed before, has informed us and becomes us. When we look at history and the notion i te ao Māori that we move into the future facing our past, whatever we embody and create is because of what and, particularly, who has gone before us. What we know about history documentation in the western world is that, like our awa that have been piped, diverted and polluted, so too have our stories. Records were inherently marred with racism and sexism, and many stories were altered or lost. Ka maumahara tātou. Let us remember like water. Let us flow memories like words through time. Let our memories flow like cool water, like hot lava; let them flow to meet us. [Read more…]

‘Disobedience and Bravery’: The Power of Female Image-Making

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Mary Macpherson

Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 367pp, $40; droplet by Sheryl Campbell (self-published, 2022), 96pp, $80

Cinema and its close relative, the still image, are among the important ways we understand the world in the twenty-first century. Whether they’re staged fiction or taken from the world, images tell us stories about ourselves and society. But what shapes the narratives is the sensibility behind the lens and the intention of the storyteller. In these two books, Gaylene’s Take, a memoir by Dame Gaylene Preston, and droplet, a photobook by Sheryl Campbell, we see the power of work by female image-makers and feel the influence of feminism, which has helped rewrite society’s behaviour toward women since the nineteenth century and earlier. [Read more…]

From the Motley of Unscripted Life

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Philip Temple

Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall (Vintage, 2022), 304pp, $36

These stories are like the objets d’art that you find in a gallery in the Whitestone Quarter of Oamaru. They are various, small and large, arranged in good order on tables above old wooden floorboards that once supported bales of wool and the tread of nailed boots. Provincial, well crafted, mostly from the hands of the gallery owner who follows you around and explains what is particular about this and that. Which can be annoying so that, in the end, you are not sure what to buy or leave behind. [Read more…]

Across the Great Divide

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Vaughan Rapatahana

On Elephant’s Shoulders by Sudha Rao (The Cuba Press, 2022), 82pp, $25; Expectation by Tom Weston (Steele Roberts, 2022), 64pp, $25; Echidna by essa may ranapiri (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25

When I first read the poetry across these three new collections, published by three separate presses, I failed to see a unifying theme. After all, one was penned by a new Kiwi who came to Aotearoa from India and now resides in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. One was created by a prolific takatāpui Māori poet based in Kirikiriroa. One was crafted by a poet I had not encountered previously, who is a lawyer from Tāmaki Makaurau. [Read more…]

The Past as Possibility

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Catherine Robertson

By the Green of the Spring by Paddy Richardson (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 312pp, $37.99; Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, 2022), 326pp, $37

A Listener review of The Luminaries charged Eleanor Catton with being ‘another New Zealand writer escaping into the past’. It’s true that many of our authors have been drawn to write at least one novel set in history, but with such variety of intent that the actual escape seems the least of their motives. There are novels that shed light on past injustice, both societal and individual; that give new life to voices marginalised or erased at the time; that aim to provide a more nuanced context for the present; or that simply can’t wait to share an absolute cracker of a tale. There are novels that are sweeping in scope and those that are intimate and personal. Some are based on scrupulous research, while others play fast and loose with the facts. The past is less a foreign country than an entire universe of possibility. [Read more…]