Search Results for: Wynn

Art and the Environment in Photobooks

October 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Mary Macpherson

The Near Future by Hannah Watkinson (self-published), 158 pp, softcover $45/hardcover $80; Conversātiō – in the company of bees by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown (Massey University Press, 2021), 272 pp, $60

At the end of her book The Near Future, photographer and writer Hannah Watkinson asks: ‘How do you love the land, as well as what’s buried beneath it?’ and then, ‘How do you make a living, if ignoring what is to come?’ These two questions underpin The Near Future as Watkinson takes us on a socioeconomic journey, using text and photographs, through the extractive industries of the West Coast, juxtaposed with the threat of climate change. [Read more…]

Fish out of water

July 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Wendy Parkins

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane (Victoria University Press, 2020), 218 pp., $30; Victory Park by Rachel Kerr (Mākaro Press, 2020), 246 pp, $35

The Swimmers by Chloe Lane and Victory Park by Rachel Kerr are both debut novels longlisted in this year’s Ockham awards (Victory Park went on to win the prize for best first novel), but this is not the only thing these books have in common. They are both also about women living precariously.

Erin, the protagonist of The Swimmers, is a postgraduate student in Auckland working part time in an art gallery. Her tenuous hold on things is not due simply to limited employment prospects, nor to her tendency to self-sabotage—perhaps best represented by her dubious relationship choices. Lane’s novel deftly describes the existential uncertainties and mis-steps of early adulthood more generally, when the strong pull towards freedom and independence strains against the emotional bonds—and baggage—connecting us to our family of origin. [Read more…]

The Importance of Rivers

December 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Graeme Wynn

The Waikato: A history of New Zealand’s greatest river by Paul Moon (Atuanui Press, 2018), 456 pp., $69.99; New Zealand’s Rivers: An environmental history by Catherine Knight (Canterbury University Press, 2016), 324 pp., $49.99

‘Rivers compel attention and invite stories.’ These words open an intriguing doctoral dissertation completed in 1999 in the Department of English in the University of British Columbia by New Zealander Charles Dawson.¹ They introduce a twisting, tumbling, rippling, glinting, eddying and surging torrent of ideas and observations that washes over an impressively varied array of personal essays, novels and poetry, brushes the banks of theory, and entrains contemporary anxieties along the way. Most of the authors Dawson considers engage, as he does, in ‘river reflection’ – a ‘process of articulation, born of contemplation and engagement with mental and physical streams’. Their physical streams are almost entirely North American, but their articulations emphasise interconnections through memory and myth, ecology and community, damage and loss, to produce particular ways of seeing and understanding. [Read more…]