Landfall Review Online

Suspended Dreamlike

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Simone Kaho

The Farewell Tourist by Alison Glenny (Otago University Press, 2018), 77 pp., $27.50; Night Music by Harvey Molloy (Black Giraffe Press, 2018), 88pp., $25

Two collections, two worlds; Alison Glenny’s first book and Harvey Molloy’s third. The books connected by a centering of natural forces, use of a narrative frame and their characters’ attempts to reconcile the cosmic with the real, to grasp at glimmers of divinity with an animal derived mind.

The world Glenny creates in The Farewell Tourist is as complete and consistent as one would expect from a novel, calling to mind proponents of fragmented narrative poetry: Charles Simic, Lynn Jenner and Selima Hill. While the collection sustains a narrative, it is a mysterious and unknowable one, built around the waning love between a nameless ‘she’ and ‘he’. [Read more…]

A Living Response

June 1, 2019 1 Comment

Ian Wedde, Gregory O’Brien & Bernadette Hall

Joanna Margaret Paul’s The Stations of the Cross, Church of St Mary, Star of the Sea, Port Chalmers

Joanna Paul was living at Port Chalmers in 1971, renting a little yellow house. She made meals for the local parish priest. I was teaching at St Dominic’s College in Dunedin. She was also a staff member there, teaching art. This was the year she married. The year Father Keane invited her to paint her own vision of The Stations of the Cross on the plaster walls of the little Catholic church. The art was celebrated for a while and then it seemed to disappear. [Read more…]

Ambition for Another Way of Life

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Rebecca Styles

Ocean of Milk by Belinda Aycrigg (99 percent press, 2018) 473 pp., $30

Amalia wakes up in hospital with no memory. She doesn’t remember her husband Jay or her children Sammie and Mattie. She still has language – she can read – but the words for objects have gone. This is the exciting premise of Belinda Aycrigg’s first novel, written during the Master’s of Creative Writing programme at Auckland University of Technology. The dream that almost every writing student has was realised when one of her external examiners wanted to publish her book. It’s an ambitious debut. [Read more…]

A Professional Spectacle

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Paula Morris

The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke by Tina Makereti (Vintage, 2018), 304pp., $38

For a novel that travels the world, there’s a quiet intimacy to the beginning of Tina Makereti’s second novel. Its protagonist is a young Māori man called many names, who experiences a series of devastating, dramatic adventures. When the novel opens he’s a feverish invalid confined to bed, ‘in the shadows’ and alert to ‘the brokenness of the world’. Hemi is one of his names and he’s in London, we learn, for a second visit. It’s almost a decade into Queen Victoria’s reign, and Hemi is tended through what he suspects may be a final illness. How did he get here, and why is he so haunted by apparitions from the past? [Read more…]

The Grit that Makes the Pearl

May 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines

The Writing Life: Twelve New Zealand authors by Deborah Shepard (Massey University Press, 2018), 463 pp., $49.99

In her introduction to The Writing Life, Deborah Shepard highlights the determination and passion of the twelve writers she interviews and curates into this collection. Shepard has selected a diverse group covering many genres: from writing for children, to many approaches to the novel, poetry and non-fiction. The writers are Joy Cowley, Marilyn Duckworth, Tessa Duder, Chris Else, Patricia Grace, David Hill, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Philip Temple and Albert Wendt. [Read more…]