Books
Moscow to Wellington
by Philip Matthews
A few people think that Landfall went off the boil after Justin Paton stopped editing it at issue 210. But as excellent as Paton’s Landfalls were, the series of guest-editorships has thrown up some worthwhile surprises – such as the new, ambitious LANDFALL 213 (University of Otago Press, $29.95). This time, the editor’s chair is more like a long bench: Gregory O’Brien, Ian Wedde, Jacob Edmond and Eugeny Pavlov do the honours. As the editors say, this issue is “an act of reciprocity – a return gesture – following the publication in Moscow in mid-2005 of Land of Seas, a major anthology of New Zealand poetry rendered expertly by Russian poets and translators”. Here, New Zealand poets help with translations of contemporary Russian poetry, while a mass of stimulating essays uncover the obvious and secret cultural connections between Russia and New Zealand – connections that are probably best represented by Alan Brunton’s Red Mole, in a good essay by Murray Edmond, although Russian writer Margarita Meklina’s conflation of New Zealand and Kazakhstan has a certain appeal.
“Across the road from the church, signs directed visitors to the Yeats Tavern and the Yeats Lounge Bar – commemorating a man who is on record as having set foot in a pub only once in his entire life,” writes Fiona Farrell in “Going to Lissadell”, a highlight of SPORT 35 (Victor-ia University Press, $19.95). Farrell held a writers’ residency in Ireland last year; one hopes that this travel essay is part of a longer work. Sport 35 is notable as a talent-spotting exercise: more than half of the contributors are yet to publish their first book. On the basis of their work here, keep an eye on Amy Brown, Gigi Fenster, Sue Orr and Sarah Laing, although the latter only just qualifies as a newbie – her first book, Coming Up Roses, is out through Random House next month.
More talent-spotting. Granta usually mixes fiction, essays, reportage and photo-graphy, but GRANTA 97 (Granta, $29.99) is entirely fiction: it’s the second “best of young American novelists” list. Here, to be young is to be under 35 and to be American is refreshingly broad – some contributors write from Thai, Indian, Chinese, Peruvian and Nigerian backgrounds. Some bigger names – Nicole Krauss, the overrated Jonathan Safran Foer – hand in slight pieces, and the strongest of the 21 stories are by Daniel Alarcon, Nell Freudenberger and Anthony Doerr. The latter’s “Procreate, Generate” – about a couple’s IVF treatment – is a masterpiece of observed detail and intuitive poetic sense, like DeLillo at his best.
