NZ Poetry Shelf
Poetry Shelf review:
Posted: Friday Jun 02, 2023
David Eggleton’s Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019 – 2022
The history shut up in the book
of a tree opens out in the shape
of a house that sways like a stout
three-master far out at sea.
The arboreal lifts from its foundations.
Between dripping leaves the trees
become hundreds of stairwells
and eaves that lead up to the stars.
Remove an eave when it gets stuck;
it's stripped back to its bare frame,
carved up and trucked off to a lifestyle block.
I am, sang the frame of the house.
from 'Sawmill Empire'
Otago University Press has produced a beautiful book to mark David Eggleton's tenure as NZ Poet Laureate (2019 - 2022). A hard cover collection with exquisite paper stock and excellent internal design choices, it is a book to savour over a long period of time. Most of the poems were written during David's laureateship, but also during a Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency at the University of Hawai'i in 2018 and a short residency at the Michael King Writer's Centre in Devonport in 2020. A handful of poems were commissioned, such as 'Hone', 'What the Future Holds' and 'Te Wheke'.
The Respirator represents the work of a poet writing at his very best, perhaps a fitting endorsement for the benefits of residencies and laureateships for writers. When I got to the end, I decided I wanted to listen to the whole collection as an audio book. Imagine being able to get audio versions of poetry collections we love. David's writing is like a musical score: distinctive, deft, diverse in melody and sumptuous in aural effects.
While the collection is divided into seven discrete parts, there is a steady transmission of motifs, moods, ideas and form that echo and overlap, that loop and arrest. The opening section, 'Circle', is prismatic in its move across land and sky, foundation myths and history, and then wonderfully, heart-catchingly, the larger focus gives way to the small, the walnut, common clay or the white butterfly. The poems trigger a mysterious heart reaction, as you move from melancholy to transformation to moodiness. These poems emanate, think pulsate, from the sweet alchemy of making a poem. I had to put the book down for a week and let the poems simmer.
Young moths rustle mottoes of dust under
hard rustle of flax, clusters of cracked pods.
An old wetā trawls a sea of forest fronds.
Wasps weave and wrap their pollen trails
over briars loaded with black blood drops
heavier than hearts can bear, for the trees
are our parents' parents (...)
from 'Generations'
The second session, 'Rāhui', comprises one longer poem: 'Rāhui: Lockdown Journal'. David's laureateship was extended for a year due to the Covid restraints but I wondered how the pandemic affected his writing. It was a pandemic that, for awhile, seemed to reshape every nook and cranny for our lives. 'The poem journal 'Rāhui' returns me to a time of daily briefings, the kindness mantra, cancellations, ghost cities, a new lexicon, re-evaluations. David ends his lockdown sequence with this line: 'A poem is a kind of respirator.' And writing (and reading) poetry becomes breathing apparatus, a survival aide, ebb and flow, rhythm and time keeper. It felt settling to have what is now distant occasions drawn close, especially when Covid still stalks and destabilises our communities.
I found myself wallowing, perhaps luxuriating in the pitch perfect lines, in the fourth section, 'Old School Ties'. Other writers are saluted, writing elders such as James K Baxter, Frank Sargeson, Karl Stead, Hone Tuwhare. His tribute to the latter is incandescent with aroha, verve, admiration. The poem, 'Sounds of the Sixties' is a terrific ear-boosting, multi-layered incantation of a particular time, and just with the lockdown journal, David transports you to the thick and pumping heart of an extraordinary elsewhere time in which, like me, you may have lived.
I'm listening to Janis wail, Get it while you can,
and to Mister Mojo Rising, the Lizard King,
who broke on through Blake's Doors of Perception.
Martin Sharp covered Cream's double album in silver.
When boiled Cona coffee grounds simmer down,
the air-con still wafts cool from the mezzanine lounge,
all through 246 Queen Street up to his Lordship's.
On black and white TV, we watched Town and Around,
and Martin Luther Ling's mourners bearing witness.
San Francisco was where you wore flowers in your hair,
while Jefferson Airplane sang, Feed your head.
from Sounds of the Sixties'
David has never shied away from politics or protest, and politics and protests are both overground and underground threads, vital, challenging, necessary - from the avarice of capitalism to the smash of climate change as we desperately learn to convert words into substantial action. Speaking out matters. Political poetry matters. Shining lights on things that need changing in the form of a poem matters.
In some ways I see this as a transformative book of odes, tributes to who and how David is, and who and how we are, from the miniature to that shifty old dog, the universal. There is a moving section devoted to the 'mana of whales'. There is a rich vein of poems dedicated to the Pacific, especially in a series written during his time in Hawai'i. The final section, 'The Wall', is almost like an ode to books, to the power of books, in all shapes and sizes.
The Respirator is a joy to read. It is precious testimony to the power and reach of poetry, to the essential role of our Poets Laureate.
I want to write a poem
like a rusted car wreck,
like a collapsed bridge,
like a random punch,
like a sly foot-tap,
like a Māori haka,
like a fresh death mask,
like peel-off future proofing,
like the smile of a stolen girlfriend,
like the scent of Adieu Sagesse,
like gravestones, like time-bombs,
fractal geometry, orchestra tom-toms.
from 'I Want to Write a Poem'
David Eggleton (Rotuman Fijian/Tongan/Pākehā) has published ten previous poetry collections. He is a six-time winner of the Montana Reviewer of the Year, and a former Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. He received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry in 2016, the same year that The Conch Trumpet won the Poetry Award at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. From 2009–17, Eggleton was editor of Landfall. He received the 2018 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers’ Residency and served as the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019–22.
Otago University Press page
David Eggleton's Poet
Laureate page