Abstract
Introduction
2017 was a year for celebrating innovation and acknowledging and reassessing tradition. The Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement recognised three major literary figures. Witi Ihimaera won the fiction award, the selection panel describing him as “one of New Zealand’s most important post-colonial writers […] celebrated as a voice for Māoritanga and a literary leader”, a status confirmed by Sleeps Standing: A Story of the Battle of Orakau, which is printed in English on the right-hand page, with Hēmi Kelly’s Maori translation on the left and is followed by eyewitness testimonies. Poet, reviewer, anthologist, children’s author, and blogger Paula Green was recognised for her contributions to poetry. 2017 was a year of accolades for Green as she was also admitted to The New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to poetry and literature. The non-fiction award went to Peter Simpson – writer, editor, critic, curator, and academic – for his more than 50 years contribution to shaping the nation’s literary culture.
The continued impact of three significant literary figures – Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, and Charles Brasch – was also reiterated. Curnow’s Collected Poems, sensitively edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm, captures the breadth and significance of Curnow’s oeuvre, while Sturm’s substantial and rigorous biography Simply by Sailing in a New Direction explores both Curnow the icon and Curnow the man. A collection of essays on Baxter’s prose writing – Quarrels with Himself edited by Peter Whiteford and Geoffrey Miles – highlights the contradictions, anxieties, and competing impulses the poet wrestled with, and his complex relationship with the society he frequently withdrew from and consistently critiqued. Brasch’s Journals 1945-57, edited by Peter Simpson, provide valuable insights into Brasch and the New Zealand literary environment that he helped to shape. Brasch’s pivotal role as a founder and editor of Landfall was acknowledged in 2017 with the establishment of a new prize: the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition.
John Newton’s Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature, 1908–1945 takes its title from Brasch’s comment that New Zealand literature required a “hard frost” to kill off the literary weeds of gentility and imitation. Newton’s fresh readings of foundational authors such as Curnow, Katherine Mansfield, and Frank Sargeson emphasise the way in which emotion is shaped by social and cultural contexts. Throughout, the book is alert to the tensions between nationalism and modernism. Gender is a key theme, from an unpacking of the cult of manliness fostered by A.R.D. Fairburn and Glover, to Robin Hyde’s complex sexuality, to perceptive analyses of Ursula Bethell and Blanche Baughan.
Erin Mercer’s Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature is equally attuned to the power of literature to speak to readers, be it the work of early- and mid-20th century authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Jean Devanny and David Cunningham, or more recent sensations such as Elizabeth Knox, Paula Morris, and Eleanor Catton. Mercer argues that in spite of a perceived preoccupation with nationalism and realism, New Zealand literature does in fact include thrillers, science fiction, Gothics and romances. Lawrence Jones writes that this “is not a ‘middling’ or ‘beige’ national literature, but one whose range of colours has simply not always been clearly visible” (Otago Daily Times, 1 April 2018).
A special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature likewise profiles the Gothic strain in the nation’s literature and is equally attuned to the full spectrum of New Zealand literature, with essays on early voices, such as Samuel Butler and M.K. Joseph, and on contemporary texts such as Anna Jackson’s poetry collection The Gas Leak and Dianna Fuemana’s play Mapaki. Fuemana’s latest work, short film Sunday Fun Day – the story of a solo mother’s love and sacrifice for her transgender teenager – screened as part of the 2017 New Zealand film festival.
The work of both established and new and emerging writers was honoured at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize went to Pip Adam for The New Animals, a parody of the Auckland fashion scene which the judges praised as “stylistically raw” and “vivid in imagery and imagination”. Elisabeth Smither won the poetry category for the third time with her 18th poetry collection Night Horse, the judges describing Smither as an “esteemed and celebrated poet who contributes greatly to the New Zealand writing community” and her poems as “gentle, uplifting, tender, humorous, well-crafted and luminous”. The Awards also encourage new talent with a series of best first book awards. The E.H. McCormick Best First Book Award for General Non-Fiction went to Diana Wichtel’s Driving to Treblinka, a moving memoir about the author’s search for her lost father. Baby by Annaleese Jochems won the Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. David Hill described this tense thriller as “flat-out, pitch-perfect flat voiced, concussively honest” (NZ Books 28[2] p21), while the guest international judge, Alan Taylor, raved that Baby is the “kind of novel that lingers in the memory long after you put it down. It is raw, bleak, blackly funny, unpredictable and unsentimental, with shafts of sunny lyricism and passages of clean prose that are veined with menace”. The third member of the new talent trio is Hannah Mettner, whose Fully Clothed and So Forgetful received the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. In “Alone in the “Woods” Mettner writes that “down any road is a poem” and Helen Lehndorf describes Mettner as “a poet awake to the world who can see the poetic potential in everything” (Landfall Review Online).
Landfall continued its fine work in encouraging literary talent through its range of awards celebrating both established and emerging writers. The Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry went to Alison Glenny for “The Farewell Tourist” an Antarctic-focused poem with a sense of play and a willingness to experiment on the page. The inaugural Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition was awarded to Andy Xie for “The Great New Zealand Myth”, a saga of migration and transformation that frames the personal story of his parents’ self-sacrifice for the sake of their offspring with the Māori narrative of Kupe’s discovery of Aotearoa. The Landfall Essay Competition honoured two first-placed essays with a strong emphasis on the body and the senses; Laurence Fearnley’s “Perfume Counter” is a hymn to scents, while “Shitfight” by Alie Benge focuses on the physical preparation of army recruits in Australia training for a theatre of war in the Middle East.
The New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2017-19 is Selina Tusitala Marsh, whose Tightrope was published in 2017. Her epigraph comes from Maualaivao Albert Wendt: “we are what we remember; the self is a trick of memory … history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we have forgotten”. Janet Hughes writes that March is “pervasively political, casting herself as a ‘poetry warrior’ on behalf of Pasifika, women, the disadvantaged, and the colonial. Her weapon is often sly mischief” (NZ Books 28[2] p31). Stylistically innovative, Marsh experiments with erasure poems, draws on nursery rhymes, riddles, spells, Pasifika chants, rap, and high modernist and postmodernist literature, and asks whether “stories” really can “cure the incurable”.
Michele Leggott’s Vanishing Points is similarly inventive, combining poetry, prose, and visual images. In a Radio New Zealand interview Leggott described the collection as an attempt to “calibrate […] against the final slide into the dark” by “reaching into the visual memory” to “bring the words to the surface and make pictures” (12 November). Janet Hughes writes that as Leggott reflects on navigating the world with minimal sight she “peers through many devices – poems, documents, images, artworks, above all visual memories – and the apertures […] deliver scraps of intense lamination and intimations of celestial brilliance” (NZ Books 28[2] p31).
Catherine Chidgey also experiments with form in At the Beat of the Pendulum, a found novel that “pushes against our notions of form, shape, and shaping. This book interrogates the limits of what a novel can be. Chidgey encourages us to consider how our lives, unvarnished, are story-like: inviting, moving, sweet, sad.” (Maggie Tripp, NZ Books 28[1], p5) Drawing on the language Chidgey encountered over the course of a year, the novel weaves the seemingly mundane and random into a complex narrative in which themes of friendship, memory, family, and creativity resonate: “We can think of stories as an attempt to give structure – beginning, middle, and end – to the daily chaos surrounding us”.
Paula Morris’ False River, a collection of short stories and essays, also blends forms. The volume has a documentary feeling, enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photos. The collection ranges from fiction to non-fictional meditation on family and historical figures such as bluesman Robert Johnson and Billy the Kid.
The power of the past is likewise evident in Patrick Evans’ Salt Picnic, the third part of a trilogy which also includes Gifted (2010) and The Back of His Head (2015). Evans writes that the series “reflects on the influence of the writing of Janet Frame … on my creative understanding of the world”. Although Evans states that the “characters and events in Salt Picnic are imagined”, the journey of protagonist Iola Farmer is embedded in the time Frame spent on the Spanish island of Ibiza in 1956-7 and the prose is also stylistically haunted by Frame. Noel Shepherd’s Mulgan is inspired by a similar love of an iconic author, the novel focusing on author John Mulgan’s support of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Greg Hall’s Good Sons reflects on the complex impact of the first world war on three friends from Oamaru, while Jenny Pattrick’s Leap of Faith revolves around the construction of the Makatotoe viaduct in the early 20th century.
Other fiction writers preferred to speculate about alternate presents and the future. The 2017 Sir Julius Vogel Award for best fantasy novel went to the tense and atmospheric Into the Mist by Lee Murray in which army personnel and militant Tuhoe separatists are stalked by a prehistoric creature in Urewera National Park. Tim Corballis’ Our Future Is in the Air is set in an alternative past in which a 1960s technology allows projections of the future, images of 9/11 leading to the grounding of the aviation industry and the increased isolation of New Zealand. Star Sailors by James McNaughton looks forward to a future Wellington in which a wall protects the privileged insiders from the poverty and stasis of the outsiders beyond the wall. The novel is grounded in real-life issues of social justice and global warming in which the free-market is blamed for both the destruction of the natural world and a segregated society.
This concern for those on the margins of society was a motivating force for several other authors. Dominic Hoey’s crowd-funded debut novel Iceland reflects on changes in Auckland and New Zealand over the last three decades, an increasing division into the haves and have-nots fuelling the protagonists’ desire to get as far away from New Zealand as possible. Five Strings by Apirana Taylor looks realistically at the hard edge of life, especially for poor and working-class Māori, focusing on two people at the absolute bottom of the social heap whose lives revolve around drugs and alcohol.
Victor Rodger’s Black Faggot and Other Plays is embedded in the author’s complex heritage: the illegitimate son of a palagi teenage mother and absent Samoan father, he was brought up in a Scottish born-again Christian family. At the Wake, Club Paradiso, and, in particular, the title play, explore what it means to be gay and Samoan in contemporary New Zealand. Frances Edmond writes that Rodger uses drama “to challenge, to unsettle traditional values and accepted codes of behaviour with menace and wit: to offend audiences, outrage them into examining their assumptions and prejudices” (NZ Books, 27[3] p33).
The Adam New Zealand Play Award, which recognises and celebrates the best in new unproduced writing for the theatre, went to Shane Bosher for Everything After. Inspired by the documentary How to Survive a Plague, the play focuses on an ageing gay man’s experience in the contemporary world and explores how personal stories intersect with historical and social forces. The judges praised the way the play “manages to wrap itself around every aspect of our tragic AIDS history, elegantly bridging the yawning gaps and misunderstandings between the awful past and the so much more hopeful present”.
A strong commitment to social justice is also part of the manifesto of Compound Press, whose declared raison d’être is to serve both artists and “social or economic justice causes”. Chris Holdaway collaborates with photographs by Chris Corson-Scott in Dreaming in the Anthropocene, a journey through New Zealand’s fading industrial heritage. Holdaway writes that “Far from an enlightened response to material exploitation, our unimaginative flight from former rural centres & industrial towns is in fact the same inability to conceive an adequate response to climate change & the Anthropocene”. David Meritt’s Crisis and Duplication – a combination of poetry and polemics – puts environmental principles into practice through its use of recycled materials, including banana box card. The Press also rebooted its journal min – a – rets after an absence of 3 years.
The continued rise of smaller presses with a strong commitment to quality, aesthetics, and the profiling of distinctive, individual voices is cause for celebration. Nina Powles Luminescent, published by Seraph Press, is a case in point. The poetry collection explores a range of historical figures, from the prominent (Katherine Mansfield in Sunflowers) to the more obscure (Phyllis Porter, an actress who died when her costume caught fire in 1923, in Here and the Flames). Historical detail in the form of visual and written artefacts from the archives is combined with experimental form, the collection comprising of five self-contained zines which can be read in any order, but which also speak to one another. Powles makes particularly effective use of erasure poetry, with partially blacked out words haunting the page, as in “Luminosity”, where the words of Beatrice M. Tinsley form a backdrop to the erasure poem: the composition of luminosity is stars, and background light
Located on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour, north of Auckland, Titus Books aims to publish writers “whose work challenges easy categorisation”. One such writer is Russell Hayley, whose final novel Moonshine Eggs presents us with what Roger Horrocks terms “a different New Zealand” in which the whimsical and comedic Harry Rejekt encounters a range of adventures and eccentrics in his Waikato home. Hayley passed away in 2016 and Murray Edmond’s obituary in New Zealand Poetry reflects on the vein of whimsy and absurdity that was a continuum in Hayley’s drama, prose writing, and poetry.
2017 also saw the loss of two Wellingtonians with a life-long commitment to children’s literacy: John McIntyre, the proprietor of The Children’s Bookshop in Kilbirnie whose manta was “a book for every child and a child for every book”, and Barbara Murison, librarian, author of the Buster Bee Stories, and editor of Around the Bookshops a quarterly review journal for schools.
New Zealand also farewelled John Clarke, writer, satirist, comedian, actor, and master of dry, laconic wit. His turn as the gumboot-wearing fount of rural wisdom, Fred Dagg, embedded Clarke’s place in the hearts of New Zealanders, before his departure for Australia in the late 1970s. Two collections – A Pleasure to Be Here and Tinkering – give a magpie insight into the range of Clarke’s interest, from politics, to sport, to reviews of Seamus Heaney and W.H. Auden, to an interrogation of “The New Zealand Sense of Humour”.