Category Archives: Literary Criticism

‘The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile’, writes Don Dellilo, admitting the failure of writing at the very moment when it is needed most. The influx of the real has smashed the symbolic order. How can we signify when there are still bodies lying under the rubble? Continue reading →

Early Landfall is a strange beast. In its pages we find poems written about manuka bushes in Pleasant Point, long, boring letters from J-Force soldiers about their hopes for the fledgling publication, interminable poems by Keith Sinclair about wandering through hills, the (Landfall prize-winning) story of a single water molecule making its way around the Antarctic and through the digestive system of a Skua and numerous curmudgeonly editorials by Brasch bemoaning the teaching of English in New Zealand. Yet in its pages, too, we find some of Janet Frame’s first publications (under the pseudonym ‘Jan Godfrey’), we witness James K Baxter’s poetic explorations and experiments, as well as the inimitable ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’, and there is even an entire issue dedicated to Sargeson’s ‘I, for One’, a novella that marked a significant change in his prose style. Continue reading →

[Images courtesy Wikipedia. Image 1: Falling Man, Richard Drew. Image 2: Natura Morta, Morandi] In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) one of the characters, Lianne, is drawn to the Giorgio Morandi still-lifes hanging on the wall: These were groupings of … Continue reading →