Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

He waka eke noa: We’re all in this together

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Anahera Gildea

Wayfinder by Jan FitzGerald (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017), 62 pp., $24.99; People from the Pit Stand Up by Sam Duckor-Jones (Victoria University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $30; Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $20

In modern parlance, the word waka is used to describe your vehicle, your mode of transport, your craft, but it also refers to your ancestral canoe and your tribe; it can be the word used to indicate a flight of birds, and it can be the medium for atua or spirits. These three collections of poetry may initially seem to have little in common, yet once inside, you realise you are in each case afloat on a waka, carefully navigated by a deft hand. Navigation itself is one of the key preoccupations of any sea people, and is an apt metaphor for all three of these books. Jan FitzGerald’s Wayfinder calls directly on ancestral connections, both animate and inanimate, to point the way; Sam Duckor-Jones ‘paddles out at dawn’; and Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau o Apanui, Ngāti Porou) uses the significant refrain ‘Am I navigating correctly?’ as an innocent question loaded with defiant barb. [Read more…]

Like Music, Like a Requiem

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Harley Hern

The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 362 pp., $30

Seventeen years after her highly praised debut novel Breakwater, Kate Duignan’s second novel, The New Ships, explores very different territory. Peter Collie is a model of reliability and responsibility, a Wellington lawyer in his late forties, financially stable, cautious and dependable. As a young man he once dismantled great ships piece by piece, but as the story begins it is Peter who is being pulled apart. His wife Moira has recently died, his grown son Aaron has absented himself, and Peter’s career and reputation are spiralling downwards. As the three epigraph poems suggest, paternity and grief are present from the first page of Chapter One. But Peter also revisits his past. Abigail, the baby daughter he lost, and Geneviève, the woman he once loved and abandoned, both haunt his thoughts. In addition, Peter uncovers a secret that, within this place of grief and loss, forces him to question his marriage, his life and his sense of self. Set mainly in New Zealand, but with action that navigates India and Pakistan, the UK and Europe, The New Ships is the story of Peter’s re-examination of his actions—or inactions—and of what it is to be a father, husband and son. [Read more…]

In Counterpoint to the Music of Time 

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Max Oettli

Aberhart Starts Here by Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2018), 136 pp., $39.99

This catalogue is based on the Christchurch Art Gallery show of Aberhart’s early work (1975 to 1983 with one picture from 1986), from when he was living in Lyttelton and later working as an instructor at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art at Ilam.

My initial thought was to wonder: have we got to a point when everything that can be written about Laurence Aberhart has been written? Can we squeeze one more review out of this gigantic stack of beautiful work that he has shored up against the crumbling ruins of our civilisation? [Read more…]

Having a WORD With You

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WORD Christchurch Festival, 29 August to 2 September 2018

Giovanni Tiso 

I used to be a writers’ festival sceptic. Aside from attending the odd book launch growing up, I never felt a great need to listen to my favourite writers present or discuss their work, let alone many writers at the same time. It struck me as an odd idea: surely this was something they all would be better suited to doing in writing, if they absolutely had to?  [Read more…]

Improvisations and Returns

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Bryan Walpert

Two Lagoons by Trevor Hayes (Seraph Press, 2017), 20 pp., $20; Floods Another Chamber by James Brown (Victoria University Press, 2017), 112 pp., $25; Symphony for Human Transport by Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books, 2017), 75 pp., $17

Trevor Hayes is a Punakaiki poet, but his chapbook is founded often on the landscapes of South America, where he has lived, travelled and taught. It opens appropriately with ‘Cartography’, orienting us with a sense of place and speaker—someone reading a map at a cafe mid-journey, even if that speaker is in the second person, the lyric ‘I’ snuck in as a quotation in italics: ‘It’s a relief to be able to say / I am here—as you look out / on the contour lines …’ The sense of journey continues in many of these beautiful, carefully rendered poems, e.g. ‘Going Nowhere’, ‘Peruvian Light’, ‘Cabo de Gata, Almería’. These are uncertain landscapes in which the speaker feels marginal, such as ‘empty museums / and vacant parking lots’, and it is clear such landscapes are both physical and emotional.  [Read more…]