Landfall 210 will be in shops this week, with an official release date of the 25th. First published in 1947, Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running literary journal. It brings together new fiction and poetry, biographical and critical essays, and reviews of books and ‘other cultural activities’.

This issue has been edited by Nick Ascroft, a witty and widely published young poet with a yen for obscure words and luxurious hairdos (though I’m willing to concede this may be an old pic). His 2000 debut From the Author of was published by VUP to critical acclaim. So was Nonsense, published when he was Burns Fellow at Otago University in 2003. He’s edited that craggy old Dunedin litmag Glottis for a while too. So, good credentials then.

We asked Nick to throw a coupla paragraphs together for us about his edition of Landfall. Here they are:

The issue I've put together is titled Out of the Mouths of Beasts. Like any ‘theme’ it's more an attempt to stitch certain things together after the fact, than any coherent statement on anything. Here though, conscious of distinguishing from Landfall's very recent Wild theme, I was interested in the modern sense of ourselves as just another part of the fauna. This, balanced against our point of departure from the animal kingdom: our fancy talking.

Though language in that sense is unbeastlike, I was interested in the animalness of it. Our squeaking and growling, the mimicking, cooing, and grooming of language. Also, I wanted to fit the theme with the cover art, and Kushana Bush's art generally, which depicts us as misfit beasts incompatible with a dignified humanity outside of the animal world, but in a funny way (important).

Best in the crop are John Dolan's and Kapka Kassabova's essays on language.

John Dolan apparently explains that ‘only in the movie The Big Lebowski (one of the best movies of all time, of course) has the true squawking, grunting, yapping, verbiage and profanity of human speech been captured for what it is’. Nick Ascroft also interviews world-renowned linguist John Taylor – perhaps sign language may be the only way to go …

Nick did find it a challenge pulling Landfall together for the first time:

It's easy enough to do a non-profit, bones-of-the-bum journal like Glottis and believe you are attaining a high standard of New Zealand writing. Possibly because we have created our own expectations. But Landfall is considered the premier journal of the country and has no reason to be anything other than the best of a good read. However, the standard of submissions is no greater than anywhere, they being, for the most part, from the same crowd. The edge is that more people appreciate the value of appearing in Landfall, thus solicitation flows without much impediment.

Hmm... interesting insights. Thanks for those words Nick, and for doing what will no doubt prove to be an excellent job of sorting the, er, wheat from the wheat.

Other contributors are:

Poetry Anna Jackson, Emma Neale, Greg O’Brien, Fiona Farrell, Mary Cresswell, Cilla McQueen, James Brown, Anna Livesey, Peter Olds, David Eggleton, Geoff Cochrane, Richard Reeve, Katherine Dolan, Robert James Berry, James McNaughton, Bernadette Hall. Fiction Ruth Dallas, Janis Freegard. Essays Martin Rumsby and John Dolan. The Landfall Review Jocelyn Harris, Corin Black, James McNaughton, John Dolan, Michael Harlow, Bridie Lonie. Cover Kushana Bush.