Landfall Review Online

Copy That

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines

Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media by Jacob Edmond (Columbia University Press, 2019), 346pp., US$64.99

Ezra Pound’s famous maxim ‘Make it new!’ was not new at all; Pound acquired the idea, whether advertently or inadvertently, from a Chinese Confucian scholar, who passed it on to an Emperor … The questions: What is original? What is a copy? What is new? are core to modernity and yet, as Frederick Jameson wrote and Jacob Edmond discusses in Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media, there is nothing new that does not have antecedents. So the compound question arises: when is ‘the new’ also a copy or, more specifically here, an ‘iteration’ of what has gone before, and how does this inform creative practice and statements of identity? [Read more…]

A Remarkable Individual

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Richard Bullen

A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley by Elspeth Sandys (Otago University Press, 2019), 324pp., $40

Even if he had achieved little else, surviving sixty years in China – from the Republican era prior to Japanese invasion to the first years of the open and reform period – would have marked Rewi Alley (1897–1987) as a remarkable individual. Yet, as his supporters recount, Alley’s record is astonishing across a number of fields, including literature. He is perhaps New Zealand’s most prolific author – fifty-three books of his own and thirteen works of translation, according to one count – best known for his poetry, travelogues and detailed descriptions of the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He produced countless articles on subjects ranging from Chinese agricultural implements and the rural paper industry, to the forms of ancient Chinese belt buckles and the Chinese in New Zealand. In the realm of literature, his best contributions are translations of classical Chinese poetry. Although his interest in material arts was not scholarly, the 1400 works he donated to Canterbury Museum form the largest collection of Chinese art in this country. [Read more…]

Ko Wai Tātou?

April 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Ben Brown

The Burning River by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, 2019), 336 pp., $30

It seems to me that, when you break it down, in the final analysis every story ever told is all about identity. Take this book review for example: starting out with the best of intentions but somewhere along the line, you just wait and see. From McCahon’s I Am to Disneyland, the question is always ‘Ko wai ahau? Who am I?’

Well, guess what. Ko wai koe. Literally, ‘You are water.’

It’s all in the wai. You see that don’t you? Of course you do.

But more than that, this sweet little double entendre underscores the essential precept of tikanga, of the way things are. Tikanga says that we are inseparable from te ao, the physical world of life and light. The Burning River I think suggests that we are inseparable from each other, even when we don’t know it. [Read more…]

Hear Here

April 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Claire Lacey

Listening In by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2019), 74 pp., $27.50; AUP New Poets 5 by Carolyn DeCarlo, Rebecca Hawkes and Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press, 2020), 114 pp., $29.99

Lynley Edmeades’ second poetry collection, Listening In, is a celebration of poetic craft. Edmeades plays with the multiplicity of language in contemporary daily life, and the poetry is so rich and layered that I found it difficult to write a concise review. There are references to diverse literary influences, including a twelfth-century French troubadour and the poets John Ashbery, Caroline Bergvall and David Eggleton. Poems about personal domesticity sit alongside others about the pervasive discourse of politics. Translations and ‘un-translations’ are peppered through the book. At its heart, this collection is about language itself: how the words we use are slippery and meaning is always contingent on context. [Read more…]