Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Why Don’t You Leap In?

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Mark Broatch

Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter (Victoria University Press, 2019), 408pp, $40

Not many memoirs sit on my shelves because most people’s lives are boring. Shayne Carter’s life has not been boring.

Probably best known for Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer, Carter has also played and guested in so many other bands he’s deeply woven into the soundtrack of this nation. Dead People I Have Known, though, is much more than just an autobiography and an account of the alternative music scene. Sure, Shayne Carter, child and rock star, is front and centre as he should be. But the book is like a Venn diagram of insightful and often humorous personal revelation, an insider’s view of the Dunedin rock scene as the fast-beating young heart of New Zealand music, and of an upbringing in a household reeking with booze, domestic violence, psychiatric dismay – and love. [Read more…]

Deconstructing a Rotten State

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Ben Brown

Novel by Vaughan Rapatahana (Rangitawa Publishing, 2018), 320pp., $38

‘In our contemporary world of increasing electronic surveillance from hegemonic national administrations, several diverse characters struggle to survive and to resist in a variety of ways. At the same time the so-called established methods of writing fiction undergo deconstruction.’

The italics are mine but the quote is lifted from the back cover blurb of this, Vaughan Rapatahana’s second novel, an earlier version of which was long-listed for the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

The assertion of deconstruction is intriguing. I have to confess, it’s one of those terms I’d always associated more with architecture and a desire to reinterpret a structure as fragmented rather than unified or symmetrical. [Read more…]

For the Record: Restoration and Archive

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Siobhan Harvey

Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, 2019), 558pp., $50; Selected Poems by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press, 2019), 237pp., $40

A number of recent releases gather the extensive output of New Zealand’s most recognised poets. Cilla McQueen’s Poeta (Otago University Press); Night Burns with a White Fire: The essential Lauris Edmond (Steele Roberts): in these and elsewhere, substantial bodies of poetic work are brought together in easily accessible anthology form. Two new handsome volumes from Victoria University Press, Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems and Brian Turner’s Selected Poems, continue the work of collecting the disparate oeuvre of our established poets into individual weighty tomes, thereby isolating and underscoring the importance of the authors concerned. [Read more…]

Impure First 

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Robyn Maree Pickens

Gretchen Albrecht: Between gesture and geometry by Luke Smythe (Massey University Press, 2019), 303pp., $80

Gretchen Albrecht: Between gesture and geometry has the heft and appearance of a monograph accompanying a major retrospective exhibition by an important senior artist. If such a retrospective at one of the country’s major public galleries is not in the planning stages, then this publication surely serves as a timely reminder of Albrecht’s significance as a New Zealand artist. [Read more…]

A Salmagundi of Sonnets, Songs and Sinewy Syntax

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Briar Wood

Time to Sing Before the Dark by Helen Bascand (Caxton Press, 2018), 94 pp., $24.95; Voodoo by Peter Bland (Steele Roberts, 2018), 63 pp., $20; Remembering a Place I’ve Never Been: The past in three voices by Heather Bauchop (Cold Hub Press, 2018), 104 pp., $30; There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime by Erik Kennedy (Victoria University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $25

It is no easy task to summarise a life, but literary executor Joanna Preston’s selection achieves a balance in this volume of Helen Bascand’s writing, Time to Sing Before the Dark. It shows the steady growth of moments into words and lines, a filtering of time, reading, conversations and personal events, to the point where they become commonplace in a positive way.

There’s a spiritual dimension to the collection, a Christian history turned over and examined beside Graeco-Roman stories, balanced and polished, so that the poems reflect difficult and unhappy experiences while making the most of the opportunity to live them. [Read more…]