A good literary journal will offer the reader an inviting range of tones, subject matter, emotional effects and cerebral demands. Familiar writers will sit alongside new voices. Landfall 240 achieves an eclectic mix of voices, especially as it favours multiple genres: poetry, fiction, memoir, essays, artworks, reviews. Such a writing smorgasbord suits my habit of devouring issues over repeated visits and the degree to which certain pieces affect me is why I am a long-term Landfall fan.

An annual highlight is always the results of the essay competition. Editor Emma Neale received 85 entries this year and A. M. McKinnon’s winning essay, Canterbury Gothic, is a little beauty. The essay begins with a great aunt, exquisitely detailed, and moves through a city’s architectural detail to the dark and moving twists in a family history.

Two short stories are equally affecting, both by writers I have long admired. Catherine Chidgey’s Leverage animates characters with sharp and excruciating detail in a workplace – and a poignant twist in the tail. Like Chidgey, Tracey Slaughter is adept at crafting complex fiction within a few pages. Her lyrical story, if found please return to: begins with, “She will forget the house.” Each sentence is a joy to read but the story is profoundly sad as it introduces a woman’s forgettings. I can’t stop thinking about these stories, the way they are acutely real, unbearably human.

Reading the poetry is always my first love in a literary journal. Two unfamiliar poets caught my attention. Cindy Botha lives in Tauranga and began writing poetry later in life while Jasmine Gallagher is a poet, critic and doctoral candidate researching ecocriticism in Aotearoa contemporary art and poetry at the University of Otago. Botha’s Zzzz is a linguistically playful, image-rich portrait of a bee: “which pauses in my palm, deliberates, / sticky as sponge-cake, pollen-smeary.” The poem is both dazzling and original.

Gallagher’s tiny poem, Tying the Dogs Up, resembles two shimmering haiku. I can almost smell the macrocarpa and the long grass in the rural scene. But then, and this is why the poem astonishes, Gallagher footnotes the word “blazed” and her poem veers off in an altogether different direction. The discovery of a cigarette tin full of uncracked wishbones opens up loss, the past, nostalgia.

Such is the reward of a good anthology, the need to track down more work by unfamiliar poets. Two poets whose work I am familiar with also hooked me: Vaughan Rapatahana and Rebecca Hawkes. Rapatahana has two poems, both presented in English and te reo Māori versions. The first poem, a lexicon of love, grapples with words when love exists beyond poetry: “alphabets cannot spell love,” “kāore e taea e ngā arapū ki te hopu te aroha.” The second poem, the swans, is as much self-observation as it is swan-observation and the unfolding contemplation is like a sweet ozone hit, both physical and philosophical: “I observe / the swans. // it is my epiphany.”

Hawkes’s extraordinary Trespassers Will Be Shot / Survivors Will Be Shot Again is a baroque depiction of shearing and slaughter in dense blocks of poetry that push lyricism and images to dizzying heights.

Landfall 240 also includes the winners of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2020 with Cilla McQueen’s Judge’s report. Plus, there is the inaugural winner of New Zealand’s richest short story prize, the 2020 Sargeson Prize, sponsored by the University of Waikato. Judge Owen Marshall selected Lies by Angela Pope.

A good literary journal will affect the reader on prismatic levels as writers test subject matter, style, self-revelation, ideas, feelings. Landfall 240 does exactly that.

Landfall 240 features work by: John Allison, Nick Ascroft, Wanda Baker, Peter Belton, Victor Billot, Ella Borrie, Cindy Botha, Liz Breslin, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Catherine Chidgey, Jennifer Compton, Lynn Davidson, Breton Dukes, Norman Franke, Jasmine Gallagher, Giles Graham, Charlotte Grimshaw, Rebecca Hawkes, Nathaniel Herz-Edinger, Zoe Higgins, Gail Ingram, Ash Davida Jane, Pippi Jean, Stacey Kokaua, A.M. McKinnon, Cilla McQueen, Alice Miller, Jessica Le Bas, Art Nahill, Jilly O’Brien, Chris Parsons, Sarah Paterson, Robyn Maree Pickens, Angela Pope, Sugu Pillay, essa may ranapiri, Vaughan Rapatahana, Alan Roddick, Ruth Russ, Lynda Scott Araya, Tracey Slaughter, Matafanua Tamatoa, Jessica Thompson-Carr, Catherine Trundle, Chris Tse, Iain Twiddy, Oscar Upperton, Tim Upperton, Dunstan Ward, Harris Williamson, Sharni Wilson, Sophia Wilson, Anna Woods.

Reviewed by Paula Green