From the creative heart of the nation Landfall 229 presents the best contemporary writing from New Zealand and the Pacific across a breadth of styles and themes, together with a lively array of cultural commentary and two stunning art portfolios.
Playwright Dean Parker provides a
remarkable memorial for Anzac Day in the form of a fantasia for voices that
features some of New Zealand’s most iconic cultural figures of the twentieth
century. Journalist Adam Dudding writes movingly and powerfully about the death
of his father Robin Dudding, journalist and editor of the literary journal Islands. Elizabeth Smither offers a wry,
small-town ‘love story’ of sorts, set in the 1950s. Tina Makereti provides a
brilliant fine-grained essay on personal identity in contemporary Aotearoa New
Zealand. David Howard delivers a tour de force of rhyming verse in his
panoramic poem ‘The Ghost of James Williamson, 1814–2014’. Clare Orchard
contributes a witty diatribe about the culture of denial. And Wystan Curnow
turns in a scabrous, rollicking, chuckling-up-his-sleeve satire on vampires in
New Zealand.
There’s fiction from Sandra Arnold and Sean
Monaghan; and Emma Neale humorously agonises about how to begin a short story.
Owen Marshall describes a not-so-perfect book launch, Nick Ascroft offers
darting, somersaulting word-play in a British multicultural supermarket, and
Louise Wallace visits Arizona.
The artwork features the tumbling dark and
light of Jeena Shin’s Motus paintings, and a brand-new series by Rob McLeod of
tiny paintings of colours running riot. Simon Richardson’s black-and-white
charcoal drawing of his daughter Mila is another visual highlight.
In addition Landfall 229 publishes the winning entry in the 2015 Caselberg
Trust International Poetry Prize, ‘Luthier’ by Sue Wootton, along with the
runner-up poem, ‘Four Photographs from a Window’ by Jessica Le Bas.
There’s much more, of course: this new
issue proves Landfall a vital
promontory in the national cultural landscape.
Landfall 229
Edited
by David Eggleton
ISBN
978-1-877578-90-8, $30
www.otago.ac.nz/press
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