Landfall 245, edited by Lynley Edmeades, reviews editor David Eggleton
Otago University Press, 2023

Landfall 245, edited by Lynley Edmeades, is rich in reading, from poetry through fiction to nonfiction and reviews. What better way to celebrate its arrival than a suite of readings in the online Poetry Shelf Cafe. Grateful thanks to all the participants – this is a treat indeed!

my review here

Otago University Press page

Medb Charleton 

‘Letter to the Editor’

Medb Charleton is originally from Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Landfall, Sport, Poetry New Zealand and Turbine | Kapohau. 

Ruben Mita

‘No Good’

Ruben Mita is a poet, musician and ecology student in Pōneke. He has been published in multiple outlets and won the 2022 Story Inc. IIML Poetry Prize. He likes fungi, fires and some noises.

Alexandra Fraser

‘Love Was Not on the Programme’

Alexandra Fraser lives in the west of beautiful Tāmaki Makaurau surrounded by kauri and tree-fern. She has been published in magazines and anthologies in Aotearoa and internationally, and has been highly placed in many poetry competitions.  Alexandra is a member of the Isthmus creative and critique group of poets, whom she met while completing the Master Creative Writing at AUT. She has published two poetry collections through Steele Roberts (‘Conversation by Owl-Light’ (2014), ‘Star Trails’ (2019)) and is working on two more – one on history and ecology, the other on networks.

Brett Reid

‘White Irises’

Brett Reid lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. When he’s not reading or writing, or having a beer, Brett is likely to be cycling, swimming or walking the latest greyhound he and his wife Helen are fostering. As well as Landfall, his poems have previously appeared in takahé, a fine line, the fib review, and Sentinel Literary Quarterly.

Jodie Dalgleish

‘The Edge of the Sea or Sea Rose (1977)’

Jodie Dalgleish is a New Zealand writer, curator, and sound artist living in Luxembourg. Her poetry has been published in Landfall, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Shearsman, Long Poem Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Azure and Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois. She holds a master’s in creative writing from Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau.

Link to ‘Sea Rose’, the painting by Joanna Margaret Paul

Bill Nelson

Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

‘Bird Life’

Bill Nelson is the author of Root Leaf Flower Fruit (2023) and Memorandum of Understanding (2016). His poems have appeared in anthologies and journals in New Zealand and overseas, as well as in dance performances, art galleries and on billstickers. In 2009 he won the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he is a founding editor of Up Country: A Journal for the NZ Outdoors. He lives in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington with his partner, two children and his dog, Callimachus Bruce.

Tim Grgec

Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

‘Swimming to Australia’

Tim Grgec is a writer and public servant based in Te Whanganui-a-tara | Wellington. His first book, All Tito’s Children, was published by Te Herenga Waka Press in 2021.

Evangeline Riddiford Graham

‘Treatment Plan’

Evangeline Riddiford Graham is the author of the poetry chapbooks Gineshoi (hard press) and La belle dame avec les mains vertes (Compound Press). Her recent writing can be found in Landfall, Art News, Sweet Mammalian, and The Spinoff. She lives in Lenapehoking New York City, where she hosts the poetry podcast Multi-Verse. 

On Our Watch, Alison Carter, Catherine Delahunty, Julie Sargisson, Lora Mountjoy
Outwatch Press, 2023

Four Coromandel poets who meet regularly to share and talk poetry, have published an inviting collection of their writing. The poems navigate a world close at hand and our world under threat. You enter the intimate and the personal alongside a deep-seated concern for our environment and the choices we make. This is poetry at its most connective, both celebratory and challenging.

So settle back into the Poetry Shelf Cafe and have listen to Alison Carter, Catherine Delahunty, Julie Sargisson and Lora Mountjoy read.

Alison Carter

‘Captured’

‘Victorian Fantasy’

‘Piwakawaka’

Alison Carter is a journalist, writer and documentary maker who lives on a native restoration block at Kikowhakarere Bay in Hauraki. She wrote and performed poetry in her twenties and has found returning to it, after many years in the world of fact, to be creatively and emotionally liberating.

Catherine Delahunty

‘Tax is Love’

‘The Detectorist’

‘Leaving Te Moehau’

Catherine Delahunty ( Pākehā) writes columns, fiction and poetry and is active in environmental campaigns and Te Tiriti education work. She lives in the Kauaeranga Valley in Ngāti Maru lands in Hauraki. She writes about the place she lives, adventures in politics and people who have touched her life. She notes that poetry is harder to write than opinions but also more liberating and random. She likes having a group to give feedback and set deadlines so that she had to stop pretending to do housework and actually write something! 

Lora Mountjoy

‘Everything Beeps’

‘Three-year-old Girls Love Pink’

‘Papatuanuku’

Lora Mountjoy is the author of two novels and has contributed poems to many publications over the years.  She has raised a family, worked as a journalist and taught creative writing in a community setting. From the late 1980s and into this century Lora enjoyed reading and performing her poetry, both in Wellington and Coromandel.   She had been focussing on other writing projects when Julie encouraged her back into poetry and is really delighted to have the chance to share writing with other women and to be part of On Our Watch.

Julie Sargisson

‘Tidal’

‘Inheritance’

‘It’s Time’

Julie Sargisson lives on the outskirts of Kapanga above a tidal salt marsh. She replants wetland areas and bare hillsides to help restore this environmental treasure. She walks the hills and shore lines, writes articles, poetry and essays. Julie is “often inspired to write by this wild finger of land, the Coromandel. The seasons, the light, the birds. But also the microcosm of tragic history; forests and people who were here before us and the long term consequences played out here.  I’m also fascinated by how poetry can go beneath the surface and echo ideas.”

Katherine Mansfield’s Europe – Station to Station, Redmer Yska
Otago University Press, 2023

Redma Yska’s Katherine Mansfield’s Europe – Station to Station is pitched as part travelogue, literary biography, detective story, ghost story. It is a postcard compendium, an intriguing homage to Katherine’s work, a heartrending navigation of the latter stages of her life. Redma travels in Katherine’s footprints, tracks, pit stops, he travels though France, Germany and Switzerland in particular, he voyages though the distortions, the myths, the sanitisations. He steps into the shoes of another by way of letters, short stories, notebooks, stations, cafes, hotels, train journeys, sanitoriums. He travels to Europe, he travels through the archives, especially when Covid prevents return visits to physical destinations. He journeys through the archives.

I read the book when ferocious winds had taken out our power, the cold was biting and the hail slammed against the windows. I read it when my long slow recovery road had been extended indefinitely and I was trying to remap my weeks and days. Reading Katherine Mansfield’s Europe made me intensely curious. What is the relationship between Illness and writing? Writing for oneself and writing for the public? Writing within a private hermit life, writing as social being who moves in the world? I am fascinated by how authors appear in pieces in letters, diaries, fiction, poetry, biographies, memoir, essays, criticism, reviews, photographs, word of mouth. The hardest question to ask is who is she? I think Redmer draws close to versions of Katherine by exploring how is she? and where is she?

This book gets under my skin, gets me thinking and gets me feeling. For the last six years of her life, Katherine endured, let’s say suffered, from TB and lung pain. She underwent a steady stream of ‘cures’ and health resorts, all the time taking the toxic, mind-altering cough medicine concocted by her London doctor. But no matter how challenged she was physically, she was drawn to writing, and it feels like writing was the greatest escape from pain and suffering:

‘My wing hurts me horribly this morning: I don’t know why. And I don’t care, really. As long as I can work – as long as I can work.’ The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield

When she was staying at the Beau Rivage Hotel, Katherine would go walking along the coast, along the rocky promontory – walking drew her closer to writing, and writing drew her closer to the world, whether remembered or observed:

‘My work is shaping up for the first time today – I feel nearer it. I can see the people walking on the shore & the flowery clusters hanging on the trees – if you know what I mean. It has only been a dim coast & a glint of foam before.’ The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is a remarkable book of openings rather than closures. Redmer presents links between Katherine’s short stories, biographical information, the letters and notebooks that evoke people, places, situations. He writes in the animated present tense of research and travel. He includes photographs and postcards that enhance his narrative, his reckonings, his discoveries, his challenges. He rebuffs the sanitising myths. He stays in places Katherine stayed. He undergoes the cold water cure that she endured at a treatment spa. He fires a pistol similar to the one Katherine used. He walks along the same promontory.

I am deeply moved by this book, by the way I become embedded in place, and how that place, through Redmer’s astute observations, draws me closer to Katherine. The book activates all your senses as you read, from the view from a window to food placed upon a table, from a hotel’s crisp bed linen to the lush garden in Menton, to his conversations with Katherine’s fans in Germany and France. This terrific writing feat, this ability to navigate and re-present versions of a life, is an essential addition to the wealth of material that critics, historians, biographers and fans have produced. Glorious.

Redmer Yska is an award-winning writer and historian based in Wellington. He has published books on a range of subjects, including New Zealand youth culture, Dutch New Zealanders (like himself), a biography of Wellington City and a history of the tabloid newspaper, NZ Truth. This is Yska’s second book about Katherine Mansfield. His first, A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington (Otago University Press, 2017), was longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Otago University Press page

The Magic Show

Owhiro Bay School Fair, first show 1pm.
The little kids sat on the floor
but I scored a front-row chair.
We sat staring at a small round table
with a dark red tablecloth while
mysterious music played from somewhere.

Mr Winkle swept in from the storeroom.
He had a red cape and drawn-on moustache. 
He made balls appear and disappear so swiftly
there was no time to be impressed.
He joined and separated silver rings.
But it wasn’t magic – it was a clever trick.

Then he removed his top hat and showed it
empty. Reaching in, he pulled out a
softtoy rabbit, which he presented to
Ruben’s little sister. He reached in again and
– ‘Hippity-hiphop’ – tipped out a real rabbit.
Everybody gasped. What if it hopped away?

As it trembled on the table, Mr Winkle passed
a small box to me, tapped it, and asked me to
open it. Cushioned inside was a white furry thing.
I didn’t know what it was. He pointed to the rabbit
and we saw it was missing a paw. ‘I wish to all of you
good luck,’ said Mr Winkle and bowed.

James Brown

James Brown continues in Wellington. ‘The Magic Show’ and ‘Love Poem’ will appear in a new collection of poems, provisionally titled Leadership Material, to be published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2024