Julia Maude Bennett’s instant record of the Tarawera volcanic eruption in 1886 as seen from Te Puke (detail). (Photo: Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
Julia Maude Bennett’s instant record of the Tarawera volcanic eruption in 1886 as seen from Te Puke (detail). (Photo: Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
A new poem by Megan Clayton.
Rūaumoko
A heart not yet born sounds like hooves under water,
or like the summer’s first gasp after surfacing.
It sounds like unexpected, like the start of a new emergency,
like woah, woah, woah, woah, woah.
I never liked it when we called out Rūaumoko,
the unborn child of cosmic parents, how he
turned in his world and we tumbled in ours.
I held tight the baby already born, thought only
of the day at hand. I did not resile. I was afraid.
For a long time, things were funny and not funny.
It was Cup Day and the sonographers were
wearing fascinators. They said, this is one point two
millimetres outside the norm. The little one turns,
a nearby rumbling and the sound of hooves.
Dense above the harbour and the faultline, there are
places named for help and succour, which I learn about
but where I do not go. The ahi tipua that warmed,
the triumphs of a friend out-of-time at Te Poho o Tamatea.
Stragglers and scrabblers are there too: the borstal boy
who climbs beyond the fenceposts, who puts
calm sheep and twilight between him and the
encroaching state; the girl who reaches up into
the deathly bloom of her despair. Here is the
vantage for which we strive and cringe and
meditate; the height at which the ātua turns,
unbothered, at which all that’s for us, does not mattter.
I say, I want to go somewhere I can scream about this.
She says, a walk in the Port Hills is a very good place
for screaming, but I do not go, though
I add to the list a professional woman
tearing her own throat on the crater rim.
I stay on the flat with the born children
who grow tall enough, warm and learning second-hand
the wild iron of their first breaths, the
almost-taken-backness of our days beside
the swamp. The widower walked his wife’s dog
every day and said, Frosty saved me. I
invent a rescue joke called the Meeting Horse,
who comes, when I call, to the office, and on
whom I ride away.
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are currently closed.
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
A boost because of the Booker, no doubt. Check out the longlist here.
3 Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
“These are fiercely multivalent pieces, unafraid of uncertainty or complication. Bad Archive touches on everything from tapestry weaving to a bender in Croatia to historical baby photography – but perhaps the question humming beneath every essay is really “what does it mean to change your perspective?” Read the rest of Maddie Ballard’s excellent analysis of this excellent book on The Spinoff here.
From the NY Times review: “The book follows the life of its narrator, Sashikala Kulenthiren, who begins the story as a teenager living in the majority-Tamil city of Jaffna, near the northern tip of Sri Lanka, in 1981. We witness Sashi’s life in the years before and during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war — another term that imposes a binary divide on a conflict that the book rightly portrays as something far more fractured.”
“Deftly written, with vividly drawn and affecting characters, laden with the quotable among the quotidian, it’s eminently readable and resonant and very relevant to these here times we be living in, with themes close to the heart, and often in the headlines. It weaves together threads of disconnection, feelings of desertion, the ongoing impacts of colonisation, of history as present and future, of capitalism, tolerance – religious and otherwise, of gentrification, validation, of privilege and platform. It’s about what we inherit – both the trauma and the taonga –and it’s about reconnection, reconciliation, reclamation, and acts of resilience and resistance.” Read Natasha Lampard’s full, ecstatic review on The Spinoff here.
Blast from the past! The first in one of the most profoundly affecting quartets of all time. Highly recommend. Then read Patricia Lockwood’s review on the LRB, which is one of the greatest literary essays of recent-ish times.
Here’s the blurb: “Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop.In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju — they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.A heart-warming story about finding comfort and acceptance in your life — and the healing power of books.”
This is almost certainly Keanu Reeves’ debut in this hallowed chart. Here’s a book trailer featuring his attempt to sell this book, a novel collab with brilliant writer China Miéville, and based on the comic book series BRZRKR that Reeves co-wrote with Matt Kindt.
‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’
Stunning book with stunning cover. Here’s the blurb: “Cookhouses and wharekai, hāngī pits and coal ranges, boil-ups and mutton – this book tells the hearty story of sustenance and manaakitanga in rural New Zealand.
The rhythms and routines of country life are at the heart of this compelling account of the rural kitchen in Aotearoa. Historian Katie Cooper explores how cooking and food practices shaped the daily lives, homes and communities of rural Pākehā and Māori throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Delving into cooking technologies, provisions, gender roles and hospitality, the story of New Zealand’s rural kitchen highlights more than just the practicalities of putting food on the table.
Thoroughly researched and richly illustrated, Rēwena and Rabbit Stew reveals the fascinating social and cultural milieu in which rural people produced, cooked and shared food in Aotearoa.”
2Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
“The book subtly conveys how the movement of humans echoes the movement of water. It’s a well-researched phenomenon that water has a healing effect on us; regardless of whether we’re aware of this or not. The sense of what’s under the land as we walk over top of it, the power of water finding its way, regardless. Water is in all of us and water is the connector through this book, through the lives of the characters and through the story world that is built so clearly.”
Read more of H-J Kilkelly’s brilliant analysis of this latest novel by one of our greatest contemporary writers on The Spinoff here.
4 Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, $37)
A cracking new historical novel from a former Ockhams shortlister. Here’s a snippet from a review over on Kete Books: “The book gets off to a cracking start, with a suspected murderer — Scottish body-snatcher William Hare — escaping the death penalty in Edinburgh and being set loose to wander who knows where. In this imagining, we are asked the question: why not Wellington? Throughout the book, flashbacks to Hare’s series of heinous crimes, enacted with his partner William Burke, are told reportage-style, hinting at what kind of man might be living among the hard-working, unsuspecting settlers of Port Nicholson.”
The second new release from Hager within months. Here’s the blurb: “Cli-fi writer and climate activist Bella Goodfellow wants to save the world, but how can she do that when she can’t even save herself? Forced from her hideaway after a landslide swallows it whole, she finds temporary accommodation with her publisher’s elderly aunt on the Kapiti Coast. But lilac-eyed Freyja is not what she seems, and soon Bella’s flung into a crazy scheme to expose a murderer and rescue a child. There’s just one problem — before they can act Bella has to believe what Freyja is telling her … and reopen her heart to her painful past.”
A heart-stopping memoir. Here’s the blurb: “In 2011, following the Taliban siege on Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, an SAS soldier identified only as Serviceman J was awarded New Zealand’s second highest military honour by showing outstanding gallantry in the face of danger. After eighteen years in the New Zealand SAS, ex-commander Jamie Pennell is now ready to tell his story.
Having survived the famously tough SAS selection course and excelled during its brutal training, Jamie was sent on four deployments to Afghanistan and played a critical role in New Zealand’s operations. From patrols across desert territories run by warlords to hostile fire and near-death combat, Serviceman J is a heart-stopping account of life inside one of the world’s most elite military forces.”
