New Zealand books in review
Wendy Parkins
She’s a Killer by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, 2021), 399pp, $35
The hardest thing is to know oneself, said Simp.
I picked up Anna Karenina.
‘Go away, I’m reading,’ I said.
How do we write the now? What can novels do—for us, to us—in a time of crisis? What can they tell us about ourselves in crisis? [Read more…]
Emma Gattey
Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2020), 176pp., $30; Love America: On the trail of writers & artists in New Mexico by Jenny Robin Jones (Calico Publishing, 2020), 211pp., $36.95
Having read Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquillity and Ruin, I more completely understand why Kim Hill is such a fan; he’s erudite (verging on the polymathic), darkly hilarious, self-deprecating, supremely uncertain—and willing to excavate the depths of those uncertainties. These winning traits feature not only in his frequent Saturday Morning appearances, but also in his comic noir novels and now this essay collection. He’s a superb thinker and writer. [Read more…]
Victor Billot
Nowhere Is Too Far Off by Peter Bland (The Cuba Press, 2020), 60pp, $25; Latitudes: New & selected poems 1954–2020 by Owen Leeming (Cold Hub Press, 2021), 144pp, $35; After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Carbide Press, 2021), 102pp, $25
Peter Bland’s 25th collection is a testament to a lengthy poetic career. It’s a slim, modest volume, and the poems in it seem slim too—stripped back and conversational for the most part. But the quiet pace and relaxed style is a trap for the unwary. These poems pack a punch. Distilled to an essential state where every word has its place, they shift from surreal dream-states to an often startling clarity of vision.
A poet who has been publishing since the 1960s, Bland is a transplant. He arrived in New Zealand as a young man from Yorkshire, where he was born in 1934. Bland has moved between Europe and New Zealand over his life. He is a friend of Owen Leeming, but unlike Leeming he is widely published, his books appearing almost annually in the last decade. Gregory O’Brien notes a ‘luminous quality’ in Bland’s poems, which is fitting—they give a sense of small, glowing incandescent bulbs, casting out light and heat. [Read more…]
Shana Chandra
Times Like These by Michelle Langstone (Allen & Unwin, 2021), 256pp, $36.99; The Commercial Hotel by John Summers (Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2021), 192pp, $30
I read to find my own hand in the pages of books. In the future, I want to keep holding books. To touch myself on each page saying, I am here, I am here, I am here. —Ocean Vuong
Just when I was trying to compose sentences to write about Michelle Langstone’s Times Like These and John Summers’ The Commercial Hotel, I happened upon this quote, from American poet Ocean Vuong. With words far better than mine, Vuong was able to encapsulate what it was like for me to read these two collections of non-fiction essays. Like him, in reading these authors’ words I too touched myself on their pages. Vuong reminded me of the exact alchemy of why we read and love books: it’s the magic of not finding ourselves alone. [Read more…]
Emma Neale
Unsheltered by Clare Moleta (Scribner, 2021), 242pp, $35
From its comfortless Grapes of Wrath epigraph to its acknowledgement in the endpapers of the Whadjuk Noongar people, this novel is unforgiving, underpinned by fear and grief that are not solely personal but species-borne; and yet it also lifts us with its glimmers of social connection, and speeds us along as if on dust-red wings.
Suffering no illusions about what a world that continues to careen into climate crisis will be like, Unsheltered also keeps the reader gripped by its alternately guttering and reigniting candle of hope, as the narrative follows the unpredictable knife-edge luck of its protagonist, the unsentimental and enormously pragmatic survivor, Li. [Read more…]
This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241
Janet Newman
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe, 2020), 280pp, $29.99
‘Do we want to know what pigs on the way to slaughter are thinking?’ asked Australian author Sophie Cunningham at the 31 March 2020 virtual launch of Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in that Country. ‘No, we don’t,’ Cunningham answered. But that is what we get in McKay’s novel. Battery-farmed pigs are released from a truck on a five-hour-plus trip to the slaughterhouse––this is the Australian outback––because their constant hello-ing has unravelled the farmers in the cab. One pig asks, ‘Is it / good. What is / it.’ It’s grass and creeks. We discover that the pigs are not merely fearful; rather, they feel something more terrible and familiar: [Read more…]