Landfall 228 is an event, an occasion: an arts and literary festival between covers. Offering darting word-play, erudite exploration of culture and literature, and lots of imaginative and critical writing from notable practitioners and new talent, Landfall 228 contains a carousel of exuberant poets, a bureau of unpredictable essayists, a cavalcade of zestful artists, a cluster of fresh and risky prose writers. The artworks include a photo-essay on a Ralph Hotere memorial installation made by sculptor Mary McFarlane; a suite of portraits by New York-based New Zealand artist Lorene Taurerewa; and black-and-white graphic art by printmaker Barry Cleavin. There are short stories or prose fiction from Sheridan Keith, Kate Davis, Russell Haley, Lisa Samuels, Andrew Paul Wood and others, as well as ‘The Ice Slide’, a chapter from a forthcoming novel by Sandra Arnold, winner of the Landfall Seresin Residency 2014. There’s a prose childhood memoir by Michele Leggott; a Melbourne memoir by David Herkt; a poetic tribute to West Coast writer Peter Hooper by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman; and essays on the mid-20th-century Auckland writer Maurice Duggan and the late 19th-century Hawke’s Bay farmer and pioneer ecologist and writer W. Herbert Guthrie-Smith. The Landfall Review section includes a major essay by C.K. Stead on Kevin Ireland’s poetry, and Damian Skinner writes about Cliff Whiting: He Toi Nuku, He Toi Rangi, while Gerry Te Kapa Coates reviews Angela Wanhalla’s award-winning book Matters of the Heart: A history of interracial marriage in New Zealand. Simone Oettli comments on Fiona Kidman’s novel The Infinite Air and David Eggleton writes about Peter McLeavey: The life and times of a New Zealand art dealer, by Jill Trevelyan. And of course there is an eclectic and wide-ranging mix of brand-new poetry by Elizabeth Smither, Bernadette Hall, Anna Jackson, Rhian Gallagher, Sue Wootton, Alan Roddick, Reihana Robinson, Jen Crawford, Maris O'Rourke, Piet Nieuwland, Richard Reeve, Nick Ascroft, Jessica Le Bas, Joanna Preston and Carolyn McCurdie - as well as poems from emerging poets Kirsti Whalen, Carin Smeaton, Rata Gordon, Lynley Edmeades, Tulia Thompson, Liz Breslin, Morgan Bach, Marissa Cappetta, Doc Drumheller - and more, much more. What a Landfall! The editor of New Zealand’s liveliest literary and arts magazine has sluiced for gold and come up trumps. Landfall 228 is abuzz with aspirational creativity, showcasing the nation’s best: from the uncanny and the unhomely to the affectionate and the disaffectionate; from the cultural physics of what where how to the pathos and wonder of past present and future…Landfall Aotearoa New Zealand: the narrative journey continues.