An edition to savour

Albert Wendt is part of the Landfall collection. Photo / Kenny Rodger

David Eggleton, who has edited the latest Landfall (it now has a revolving editor), has produced a mix of writers that is immensely satisfying.

Literary journals are always in danger of becoming clubhouses, but Eggleton's issue is wide open, not just in view of the selected writers but also in the range of styles and subject matter.

Like all recent Landfalls, Eggleton's pursues a specific theme. Choosing "islands" could have been a disaster, with writers wallowing in stale treatments of past approaches, but instead the writers have made the theme (as it should be) utterly and captivatingly relevant.

In part, this is due to the uplift of a new wave of Pacific writers such as Doug Poole and Karlo Mila.

I liked, too, the way intellectual argument sits among poems and fictions. Laurence Simmonds writes deep within the theoretical grid that feeds the academy as he creatively rethinks his status as a "European" (insider and outsider, here and there) with the assistance of Derrida and the ocean.

Anne Kennedy's terrific Forty Years of Habitation presents an underlying politics of the land.

The politics appear fleetingly in the poem's cracks and crevices; the land itself is personified as body; as face, hair, dream, fever, soul and so on.

Highlights also include Robert Sullivan's Maui's Alternate Prayer and Albert Wendt's moving tribute to the late Alistair Te Ariki Campbell.

New voices, such as Natasha Dennerstein and Larry Matthews, add contrasting energies. Dennerstein's Emergency! is a poem lush with words and startling imagery, and provides a slightly surreal take on crisis and catastrophe.

Matthews' poem, Internal Affairs, is a bit like a Russian doll with one part opening into another, and into yet another. It is both evocative and tender.

In an issue that evolves around its island subject matter, it is fitting that there is a celebration of Charles Brasch, the journal's founding editor.

Brasch, the author of one of our most quoted lines of poetry ("distance looks our way") is made present in memoir, letters, poetry and critical thought. The issue also announces the results of two literary competitions that it sponsors. The winners of the Landfall essay competition are terrific reads.

The winner, Ashleigh Young's Wolf Man, confirms that essays don't need to stick tight to the academic model in order to test out ideas successfully. Asheligh's provocative essay has the appearance of the personal (although may of course be fictional) as it navigates the effects of facial hair on women.

A major highlight, John Newton's Becoming Pakeha, is the utterly germane argument of an intellectual and is both eloquent and accessible. Newton proposes the need for increased self-awareness ("of debt and desires") on the part of Pakeha in the decolonisation process.

Ian Wedde's judge's report for the Kathleen Grattan Award For Poetry placed the short-listed manuscripts (Leigh Davis, Wystan Curnow, Gregory O'Brien and Kate Camp) on my must-read list if and when they appear in print.

Leigh Davis' winning entry was written during treatment for a brain tumour in the final stages of his life, and will be published by Otago University Press.

The Landfall reviews often move beyond the book under scrutiny to wider arguments and in doing so help establish the journal as a well-needed forum for literary debate. At times the balance favours sidetracking argument ahead of a focus on the book under review, but on other occasions the book itself becomes the centre of attention.

Finally, Andy Leleisi'uao's paintings provide a welcome vitality to a Landfall issue that pulsates with intellectual, emotional and poetic life. I loved it.

Landfall 218: Islands Ed
by David Eggleton (Otago University Press $29.95)

Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.