Landfall Review Online

Anxieties of Influence, Impermanence

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Genevieve Scanlan

A Field Officer’s Notebook by Dan Davin (Cold Hub Press, 2018), 104 pp., $29.95; Murmurations by Art Nahill (Two Hemispheres Poetry, 2018) 68 pp., $27; How to Defeat the Philistines by David Beach (David Beach, 2018), 64 pp., $25; Crisis & Duplication by David Merritt (Compound Press, 2017), 22 pp., $20

‘If I ever get round to making sense of the preceding,’ wrote Dan Davin before his death, ‘I’ll call it Field Officer’s Notebook.’ Editor Robert McLean has honoured this intention, making sense and order of a lifetime’s work in this posthumously published collection. McLean’s introduction provides valuable context, describing the three stages of life in which Davin’s poetry was written: while at university, while serving in World War Two, and during his later years in England. And though the introduction self-consciously admits that some of Davin’s work might now seem dated, the depth of feeling evoked in these poems spans the decades easily.

These are poems heavy with the weight of disillusionment – even those written long before Davin had seen the horrors of war. ‘Perspective’ captures that disenchantment that is keenest-felt when fresh, in adolescence: ‘My father was a hero once. / Now he is a man. / The world shrinks from infinity / To a finger’s span.’ A few pages on comes a lament for wasted talent: ‘In what diversity of sterile tasks / Have I diffused my power, that these full years / Have built no monument of mine.’ If the language and style here are period-specific, the feeling is surely near-universal. [Read more…]

The Ground Zero of Change

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Chris Else

Confessions of a Cockroach and Headstone: two novellas by Mike Johnson (99% Press, 2017) 180 pp., $29.95

‘Mike Johnson is the most underrated of all living New Zealand authors.’ So said Iain Sharp in a Sunday Star-Times review of Johnson’s The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He. There is substance to Sharp’s claim. Johnson has published nine works of longer fiction, two collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, a medical memoir and a children’s book. Despite critical attention and recognition from awards and dispensers of fellowships, in a career spanning over thirty years he has never managed to retain a mainstream publisher and has had only fleeting recognition from readers and reviewers. The reason for this, it seems to me, lies as much in the literary context as in Johnson’s creative predilections.

For the most part, New Zealand’s literary taste still has a preference for realism. Or, to put this point in commercial terms, the small overall size of the New Zealand market means that the sectors of that market that are keen on non-realistic modes – fantasy, say, or science fiction – are too small to sustain local publishing programmes. As a major local publisher said to me recently, ‘Dystopian doesn’t sell, fantasy doesn’t sell, magic realism doesn’t sell, ghost stories don’t sell.’ Even crime seems to be marginal. No doubt there is an element of cultural cringe in this situation. Local writers of fantasy are competing in a global market, and a New Zealand fan is more likely to look to one of the big overseas publishers than to seek satisfaction in the local scene. [Read more…]

Our Polyglot Contemporary

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Janet M. Wilson

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 754 pp., £175; Volume 4, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including miscellaneous works, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 500 pp., £175

These two handsome volumes are successors to the collected fiction, volumes 1 and 2 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, co-edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, who, in making available all Mansfield’s creative work, aimed at a remapping that would show her ‘rare originality’. The variety of short stories, sketches, vignettes and dialogues displayed in the collected fiction is amply complemented by the range of nonfiction presented in these volumes: Mansfield’s poetry and critical writings in volume 3, and her diaries and miscellaneous works in volume 4. Most of Mansfield’s non-fictional writings have been published in various editions since her death, many poorly edited by John Middleton Murry. The new volumes feature much newly discovered work presented with up-to-date scholarship and ample textual annotation. Volume 4 publishes Mansfield’s diaries in a chronological order, by contrast to Margaret Scott’s 1997 The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. By bringing together the non-fiction as a greatly expanded corpus, the editors display as never before Mansfield’s multiple talents as diarist and journal writer, translator, poet, reviewer and essayist, and producer of parodies, pastiches and aphorisms.

The gargantuan, 750-page volume 3 consists of almost all the nonfiction that Mansfield ever wrote (apart from her personal writing), and opens with 179 poems, almost double the number collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1988 edition. Many new poems are recent discoveries made by Kimber in the Alexander Turnbull Library, including 19 poems in a notebook titled ‘Little Fronds’, written when Mansfield was at Queen’s College, London, dedicated to ‘Ake, Ake Aroha’ and signed ‘Kathleen M. Beauchamp’. Volume 4 contains Kimber’s most recent discovery, made in the Newberry Library – too late to be included in volume 3 – of the treasure trove of poems entitled ‘The Earth Child’ (1910), a cycle of 35 poems that Mansfield hoped would be published in 1910, which shows her, the editors claim, ‘at the height of her poetic powers’. Only nine of the poems have been previously published, and the entire sequence is reproduced in the section ‘Miscellany’. Despite the slightness and unevenness of this apprentice work, mostly written before Mansfield left for London in 1908, it offers glimpses of what was to come. [Read more…]

Edge-of-the-Ledge Reading

November 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Shaun Barnett

To the Mountains: A collection of New Zealand alpine writing selected by Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey (Otago University Press, 2018), 372 pp., $45

New Zealand is a mountainous land, so it’s hardly surprising that landscape often shapes our literature. Think of Mulgan’s protagonist Johnson, a fugitive traipsing through the Kaimanawa Ranges in Man Alone. But what of those who deliberately choose to go to the mountains: for exploration, for challenge, for rejuvenation?

Otago-based writers Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey have carefully selected material for To the Mountains, the only anthology of New Zealand alpine writing to appear in over three decades. Like the threads of a climbing rope, they blend historic writing with modern, vivid accounts of epic climbs with thoughtful contemplation, and the voices of men with women, Māori with Pākehā, children with adults. This is no random collection, but a considered compilation structured into four themes – ‘Approach’, ‘Climb’, ‘Epic’ and ‘Reflection’ – which mimic a mountaineer’s journey. [Read more…]

Macpherson’s Part in the City

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017 by Mary Macpherson with an essay by Gregory O’Brien (Mary Macpherson and PhotoForum Inc., 2018), 44 pp, $35

Designated as PhotoForum 89. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 29 May to 22 July 2018 as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange’s famous quote comes to mind as I open the pages of Mary Macpherson’s new photographic book, The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017.¹ Modestly sized, it presents 25 superbly coloured photographs of the city, and an essay by Gregory O’Brien. [Read more…]