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

Regret

I’m in the stunt business and I just want to fall down.
But that’s not the way it works.
It’s storytelling, but I have comfortable roots.

And I was still trying to learn and define who I was.
And you’re waiting eight hours for a giant stunt.
And you don’t understand the reason.

Went through a character shift
from the ruthless aggression guy, to the rap guy,
to the non-rap guy, to the superman guy.

Feel free to be open with me.
I have no ego.
My ego is making an awesome movie.

These were the prime years
when things were catching fire, and the place
I really wanted to be was on that canvas.

No ego. Let’s make great moments
and how can we do that?
My ego lies with the finished product.

Life is always good no matter what.
We tell stories sometimes that are real close to the vest.
I learn from every single situation.

If this thing doesn’t fly I’m putting it on my shoulders
and I’m gonna figure out why and I’m hopefully
gonna get another chance to attack it again.

Man I don’t have a single regret in my life.
I’ve been on such a crazy ride.
I don’t regret a single thing man not one thing.

Airini Beautrais

Airini Beautrais‘s work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa and elsewhere. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP, 2017). Her first collection, Secret Heart (VUP, 2006), won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2007 NZ Book Awards. In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. She has also been a judge for a number of awards, including the 2018 NZ Book Awards. Her most recent book is the short story collection Bug Week (VUP, 2020). She lives in Whanganui with her two sons and two cats. 

Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

Claire Orchard reads from Liveability, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

‘Where duty lies’

‘December’

‘Our son of eighteen summers’

‘When I bring up advance care planning’

Claire Orchard (she/her) lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her second poetry collection, Liveability is now available from your local independent bookstore or direct from the publisher Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Bonfires on the ice

It’s getting colder as the flames
rise from the bonfires, real and virtual.
See how they flicker in the darkling air.

What’s sending up such enormous sparks?
Lines that once lasted a lifetime.
Look, they show up clear, then disappear.

Here’s one: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
And another: A squirt of slippery Delight.
Now they’re coming thicker, faster.

Which watch not one another out of fear.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

A charred scrap settles on my hand
(Belinda smiled and all the world was gay)
flares for a second, is whirled away.

Eventually the ice will calve and dissolve;
the bonfires fade and crash.

Harry Ricketts

Harry Ricketts has published around 30 books, including literary biographies, personal essays and twelve collections of poems (most recently, Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021).

The Deck, Fiona Farrell, Penguin, 2023

The novelist is about to step out onto the unknown ground that is every new book. She will make up characters and a setting and a plot and walk about in the imaginary land that always lies just offshore, alongside reality. She has no idea if her story will work. It’s always a bit of a gamble. Maybe making things up will feel ridiculous, irrelevant before the online deluge of fact. Maybe she’ll lose her nerve. Maybe her imagination will fail her, her characters will dwindle to dots. Maybe she will be be unable to settle to the daily grind at the computer, distracted by the news reports and their insistence on failure, collapse, shambles.

from ‘The Frame’

Fiona Farrell’s writing has enthralled and inspired me from the moment I fell into the freshness and delight of The Skinny Louise Book in 1992. Since then I have devoured her poetry, her novels and her nonfiction. Her writing prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes was humane, lyrical, layered and so utterly necessary. When I think of Fiona’s writing, I am reminded of the power of books, regardless of style or genre, to move us, nourish us, to challenge without ever losing touch with both heart and mind.

I recently read an essay in The New Yorker by a disgruntled critic who poured a wet blanket over our contemporary enchantment with and cravings for stories and storytelling. We are besotted with story. And yes, a story might not have the power to dismantle global warming or feed the hungry or put an end to violence, yet stories have mattered and continue to matter. It matters that the awkward child picks up the picture book and sees an awkward child dressing in a sparkling dress or singing out of key or kicking a football through a hoop. Or reading a book in a nest for an elephlion. It matters that I read stories that entertain me, lift me out of despair and maybe signal choices for the good of the planet. It matters that I can step into other points of view, close to mine, or at arm’s length. As the film-directors, the Tavianni brothers exclaimed when they first saw themselves and their stories reflected on the Italian cinema screen: ‘Cinema or death!’ We tell stories from the moment we get out of bed; to ourselves, to each other, to our friends, family, doctors, politicians, to strangers. Some of us crave to write. We might be plagued with doubt over sending our books in to the world and what difference that book will make. But stories represent how, where, who and why we are – and how, where, who and why we will or might be.

Fiona Farrell’s new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.

The Deck steps off from Covid, borrowing the structure and motifs of Boccaccio’s The Decameron from the 14th century to re-present a novel that speaks from and to our contemporary plague. Boccaccio sets his novel, his sequence of stories and homage to the reach of storytelling, in the time of the plague in Florence. He opens with ‘La cornice’ (The frame), an autobiographical and nonfiction introduction to the scene and the situation. Fiona follows suit. I am catapulted body and heart to our time of Covid, to the new language that introduced bubbles and isolation, RAT testing and quarantine hotels, border controls and conspiracy theories, masks and hand sanitisers, the 1pm news gatherings and the daily statistics, teddy bears on fences and deserted city streets, online ordering and the stockpiling of flour and toilet paper.

For me, Fiona nails the uncertainty, the unreality and complexity of the situation, the daily reassessments and difficult choices, the willingness to work together for the good of the whole, the unwillingness by some to relinquish individual freedoms. The reevaluation of what mattered.

The Deck. When it looks like the country is about to collapse under another plague, Philippa makes a beeline for her beach house with her husband Tom and some friends. The retreat feels like a mini intermission, a temporary retreat from living in the thick of the plague, its consequences and the tough decisions. As in The Decameron, the group of friends pass the time drinking, eating, telling stories. So what stories get shared on the brink of catastrophe? In the frame story, Fiona speaks as the novelist, and asks what the point of writing fiction or a novel is, when the world is under multiple threats. She asks: ‘Is fiction no more than a brief solace, a distraction on our the way to our own extinction?’

On the third night, the friends debate China v America, war and famine issues, and then meander through best books, best movies (yes The Bicycle Thief!), places to visit, sports, philosophy. Each person takes a turn at spinning a yarn, drawing upon their own life, hinting at dark undercurrents, turning points, mis-turning points, yearnings. At times the story is a gut a punch to the listener, a secret revealed in public. Each story is headed by the epigraph: ‘A tale of one who, after divers misadventures, at last attains a goal of unexpected felicity.’

Ah. This is a book to read for yourself, to track and trace the impact on your own heart and mind as you are transported back to 2020 and the arrival of Covid, and into your own cache of stories, secrets and intimacies, your misadventures and felicities. I am struck by how we perceive things, how the protests at parliament were a sword in our side, when decades ago, the anti-Apartheid and Vietnam protests attracted so many more protestors. Ah. And how the image of the desecrated children’s slide at Parliament was so unfathomable. What on earth does this rebellious act stand for?

I am at the novel’s ending. I love the novel’s ending. I am transported back to the endings of post-war Italian neorealist films. I am there watching (think The Bicycle Thief and Rome, Open City) as the characters and a group of children walk down the road, down the road to the final frame, to the word HOPE, and even though I am wrung out and smashed to smithereens by planetary greed, I am strengthened by a collective impulse to write – as resistance, as solace, as illumination. There are multiple versions of who we are and there are multiple versions of who we might be. We need novels. We need stories. We need imagination and we need the mirror held up.

Fiona Farrell’s remarkable new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.

Fiona Farrell, born in Oamaru, was educated at the universities of Otago and Toronto, and has published volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, non-fiction works, and many novels. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction. Other novels, poetry and non-fiction books have been shortlisted for the Montana and New Zealand Post Book Awards with four novels also nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. The Broken Book, a book of essays relating to the Christchurch earthquakes, was shortlisted for the non-fiction award in the 2012 Book Awards and critically greeted as the ‘first major artwork’ to emerge from the event. Her work has been published around the world, including in the US, France and the UK.

Penguin page

a – wake – ( e ) nd, Audrey Brown-Pereira, Sau’foi Press, 2023

Audrey Brown-Pereira’s third poetry collection, a – wake – (e) nd, is a moving evocation of being, remembering and retrieving, of acknowledging and connecting. You move between fire and fever, ocean and silence, wind and light. There is breath and there is breathe and there is breathing.

Audrey is writing the girl, the woman, she is writing a constellation of selves, she is writing she and I and me and you and we. She is rendering the voice of the woman audible, the woman visible. She is recognising self within self, writing to remember, writing to ‘forget me (k)not’ as one poem is entitled. It is for daughters. It is for her. It is speaking in poetic form to and with and by and for whanua and family, for poetry lovers.

It is political and it personal. It is raising the red flag on climate change and the effect our choices have had and are having on the Pacific Ocean and its inhabitants.

Audrey resists a seamless word flow for both eye and ear. Open the collection and you will fall upon the spaces along the lines, the gaps, the clearings, the intake of breath. These might be registered as silent beats or as rich gatherings. The space becomes bridge between this word and that word, this feeling and that feeling, this recollection and that idea. It is musical – think syncopation, harmony, melody. It is daydream and it is sidetrack. I am (a)float on these islands of words.

And there we go – carried to the i (s) land. The fractured word re-forms to sing of self and belonging and again, yes, of being. The reverberations are there too in the title poem, ‘a- wake – (e) nd’. Both revitalised and reclaimed words are windows, doorways, exquisite pathways into the collection – this writing and this reading is an awakening. A reforming of self. There is pain and there is a slow vital spacing out of self. Think heart and think body. Think loved and loving and loved ones. The writing is awake to or with or for or by: she and I and me and you.

Find a copy of the book – nestle into the clearings – tune in your ear and your eye. Listen to Audrey read from the collection here. Follow the wind and the light, the ocean and the land, as you are embraced by the rhythm and melody and remembering. This is a glorious book of her, of making woman girl she present. It is voyage and epiphany and talisman. It is to hold close and breathe in. I love it. So very much.

Audrey Teuki Tetupuariki Tuioti Brown-Pereira (1975) is an innovative poet who plays with text on the page and words in the air/ear. Poetry collections include Threads of Tivaevae: Kaleidoskope of Kolours (2002) with Veronica Vaevae, published by Steele Roberts and Passages in Between I(s)lands (2014) with Ala Press. Born in the Cook Islands and raised in New Zealand, Audrey lives in Samoa with her family. She is a graduate of Auckland University and the National University of Samoa.

Saufo’i Press page

Ichthyosaurus

1

It nudges its long snout
through the dappled curtains of time.

In a green light its teeth shine;
they are sharpened emeralds 

wanting, waiting and momentarily  
there is no longer snatch gob and grab –

there is only the soft rise and fall,  
the even breath of a sleeping ocean.

2

There was a perfect arch 
from hill to shining hill,
the dark water between.

There was the smell of morning
coffee, a warm cup and toast
to ward off the autumn chill.

There is not one centimetre 
of human history in the
kilometres of its eyes.

It would have sensed
your uneven breath as 
you waited, warm and naked,

and as your rainbow body
arched with love, it would
have burst through the surface

of the ocean, its jaws stretched
beyond lex talionis, beyond reason,
streaming with saltwater, with lust.

James Norcliffe
from Shadow Play, Proverse Press, 2011

Note

Over a dozen years ago, Vaughan Rapatahana prodded me to enter a manuscript for the Proverse Prize. Vaughan had entered the competition the previous year and had been a finalist and subsequently published by Proverse Press. His title was Home, Away, Elsewhere and Vaughan, an old friend and colleague from Brunei days, asked me to provide an introduction, which I was very happy to do. Proverse is a Hong Kong publisher run by expatriate New Zealander Gillian Bickley and her husband Verner Bickley. Apart from Vaughan they published the late Laura Solomon, another prize winner.

Accordingly, I submitted my ms Shadow Play which was a finalist and subsequently published by the press in 2011. I am very fond of this book, which, I feel, contains some of my best work. Perhaps, in retrospect, publishing a collection in Hong Kong wasn’t the best strategic move as the book had only minimal distribution in New Zealand and very few if any reviews here. 

I’ve chosen the poem ‘Ichthyosaurus’, originally published in Landfall. According to Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine, who was one of a number who provided an encomium for the book, “(this) great poem exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work”. I imagine that is so. Many of the poems are layered and built on anxiety. We live near the sea, the sea where aeons ago the ichthyosaurus ruled. The imagined creature is pretty scary and not a bad – if over the top – simulacrum of our modern anxieties.

James Norcliffe is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction and an editor. His eleventh collection of poetry Letter to ‘Oumuamua was published this year by Otago University Press. he has written many novels for young people and his novel for adults The Frog Prince was published last year by Penguin Random House. In 2022 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry and this year was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.

Favourite poems is a series where poets pick a favourite poem from their own backlist and write a note to go with it.