Landfall 226 - wonderful issue - brilliant cover

Heaven and Hell - Edited by David Eggleton -

Otago University Press - $30.00

This fiery, celestial issue of Landfall transports us to paradises, purgatories, limbos, netherworlds, infernal regions and realms beyond.  Edited by David Eggleton, Landfall 226 contains some of the best contemporary imaginative local writing.

Among the poetry is a new suite of poems by Cilla McQueen on the underworld, while other poets with new work included on themes heavenly and hellish are: Joan Fleming, Frankie McMillan, Joanna Preston, Doc Drumheller, Chris Tse, Piet Nieuwland, Rachel Bush, Mary Macpherson, Richard Reeve, David Howard, Alice Miller, Stephen Oliver and Nicholas Reid, and more.

An especially strong fiction section includes a haunting short story by the American writer and creative writing teacher Thom Conroy, now resident in New Zealand, along with compelling stories by Elizabeth Smither, Tina Shaw, Sue Wootton, Tracey Slaughter, Sean Monaghan and others.

Landfall 226 features artwork by painter Liz Maw, sculptor Lonnie Hutchinson and printmaker Marion Maguire.

Siobhan Harvey won the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2013 with a collection of poems about her autistic son. Landfall 226 contains the judge’s report on the award.  This issue also features the winning entry in the 2013 Landfall Essay Competition, ‘Winter’, by Tim Corballis, an erudite, lyrical and wide-ranging look at the personal, political and cultural, as well as metereological implications of the word ‘winter’. Among other essayists, New Zealand expatriate Janet Holst provides an account of life in the Islamic city of Muscat, on the Gulf of Oman. 

Landfall 226 also includes serious reviews of New Zealand books and significant commentaries on aspects of contemporary culture, including Emma Neale on the collected fiction of Katherine Mansfield and Jodie Dalgleish on a politically influential Wellington Media Collective. Chris Humphreys writes about Carl Shuker’s novel The Anti-Lebanon, while Nicholas Reid evaluates Eleanor Catton’s novel The Luminaries. There is section devoted to poets writing about other poets whose work they know well: Jan Kemp writes about Fleur Adcock; Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes about John Newton; Lindsay Rabbitt writes about Geoff Cochrane.

The launch of ‘Landfall 226: Heaven & Hell’ was celebrated at the University Book Shop, Dunedin, last Thursday, with readings by contributing poets (from left) Lynley Edmeades, Richard Reeve Loveday Why, David Eggleton (Landfall editor) and David Howard.

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