On Wednesday 29 March, we launched David Eggleton's Poet Laureate Collection, Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019–2022, at Dunedin's fantastic University Book Shop. It was great to see a crowd of poetry lovers gathered around to celebrate with us. A huge thank you to everyone who came along, and thank you also to Richard Wallis who set the scene with some amazing classical guitar performances.
Thank you also to Victor Billot, who kindly launched the book. Here's what he had to say ...
"Tonight I have the honour of launching Respirator, the new collection from David Eggleton, published by Otago University Press.
Respirator is a substantial collection largely composed over the period of David's tenure as Poet Laureate, a role he held from 2019–2022. These years overlapped with the COVID pandemic.
David's tenure as Laureate was expanded to three years from the usual two due to the disruption caused by COVID to his activities as Laureate. The Laureate's role covers both writing and performing poetry, and acting as an ambassador and advocate for poetry. David put his time as Laureate to good use. The scale and substance of Respirator is testimony of his creative endeavours during this strange and difficult period.
Originally sponsored by the Te Mata Estate Winery, since 2007 the Poet Laureateship has been appointed by the National Library of New Zealand. In addition to this honour, David has gained many distinguished recognitions of his work including the Burns Fellowship (1990) all the way through to the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry in 2016, the same year he was winner of the Poetry Award at the 2016 Ockhams. In 2021, his Collected Poems was published by Otago University Press. David is an award winning art critic, writer and from 2009–2017 was editor of Landfall, New Zealand's pre-eminent journal of arts and letters. He has made his home in Dunedin for many years and is a regular performer of poetry, and a supporter of poets and poetry.
It would miss the point to focus entirely on the official recognition of his work. David is the poet who didn't exactly come in from the cold, but came in from the subtropics, and from outside the comfort zone. He has moved from the edges of the seventies counterculture, through the post-punk era, and his poetry interpreted the tectonic shift of our economy and society throughout the Rogernomics and Ruthenasia experience. Since these early years David's trajectory has steadily moved towards the centre of things but at the same time he has remained what I described in a book review as a quantum anomaly, neither integrated into the lit crit creative writing academocracy, nor marginalized in beatnik obscurity.
I first read David's work as a high school student in the 1980s. I felt a gravitational pull towards all forms of writing, but poetry held a special kind of attraction. Historically a male dominated scene in NZ, poetry was represented by larger than life self-mythologizing characters often making up for their bookish ways by asserting a masculine identity often fuelled by alcohol abuse.
David's poetry seemed like cut like a sizzling thunderbolt through the earnest dog-eared compendiums of nation building in verse. I got hold of a copy of People of the Land, his second collection published by Penguin in 1988. As someone emerging into the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, at a time of social disruption, this book had a formative influence on me. It opened a path into poetry as something that was happening here and now. It engaged with the contemporary mood of chaos and instability. It was magpie like, irreverent, anarchic, conversational, colloquial, filled with an energetic glee, a cackle in the dark, nodding to rock rhythms and hip hop wordology, a highly compressed and concentrated data dump riffing off the jargon and brandspeak of free market mania, a close focus high resolution framing of the natural and physical world. It seemed to map the mundane reality I was living in, give it a surreal spin, and make a walk to the dairy an entirely new experience. You just had to look around you. This was poetry as a mind altering substance.
While this side of Eggleton the poet established his early persona, it has never limited him. Over the decades since, he emerged as something of a mobile one man cultural industry, although in a uniquely New Zealand way, in that his democratic temperament and low-key presence has not removed him from his roots in the culture. His ethnic heritage – Rotuman and Tongan on his maternal side, and English immigrant on his paternal side – may have something to do with his unique ability to trace and navigate the invisible faultlines of our society. He feels like a writer who walks in many worlds. There is a certain hard case humour in there, which may not have emerged in a poet who experienced a more socially and economically conventional and comfortable background. There is a suspicion of power, a willingness to take a jab at the complacent and the conformist, but minus the ponderous moralism of less nimble writers. His poems phase shift between the brusque vernacular of bus stop conversations to a mystical lyricism interfacing with the full spectrum of outward existence. It is fair to say that David is a poem of the outside world, engaging with public and cultural life, rather than travelling on an inward journey of psychological bean counting. But there is a new more personal sense of reflection on the passing of time in this collection which provides another layer to the poems.
It seems like a hard act to follow, after producing a Collected Poems in 2021. What then? Rather than a lull, David has emerged with a major new collection that tracks our times with renewed vigour. In 2020, the COVID pandemic provided a major disruption to New Zealand society and global society. It was a different shock to the economic virus of the 1980s and 1990s but of an approximate magnitude. The virus was a social contagion as well as a physical one. It created alienation, death, confusion, paranoia, hardship, polarisation, conspiracy, economic chaos, and turned many of the norms and expectations of society sideways. The consequences are still echoing and reverberating and despite a stabilising of a sort, it feels like things are changed forever. In this strange new land, the poems of Respirator sift and observe and crystallise.
In the era of Covid-19, we locked down
to save the pāua and the glory of the nation, for the future.
It ain't nothing, so give it a name – the future.
In quantum mechanics,
the answers surround us, but we don't know the question –
call it the future.
(From What the Future Holds)
In this collection, David Eggleton, no longer a young poet, has moved beyond his status as iconoclastic outlier of New Zealand letters, to go deeper and repurpose his poetic persona once again. A substantial number of poems in this collection are not a response to the pandemic and its shockwaves. A series of poems flowing from his engagement with Pacific culture and environment composed during his 2018 Fulbright – Creative New Zealand Residency in Hawaii form a gravitational core to the collection. The experience seems to have expanded David's poetry once again.
There has been a lot of social media noise lately about a poem about Captain Cook which saw sides drawn up in the latest engagement of our terminal identity politics culture wars. In this volume is a poem that covers the same territory. Compare, contrast and consider. Poems can be weaponised, meant to wound, to speak bitterness, to even up the scorecard, and that has a place. Poems can also interpret, imagine and acknowledge complexity, while acting as an antidote to official histories that provide self-serving narratives for the dominant. I think David's poem The Death of Kapene Kuke does this.
Was Kuke a god? Lono-makua, his rain keeper?
No, Kuke was not a god; he deceived the people.
Abstracted, careless, Kuke misunderstood all.
At Makakihi, to the thudding of drums,
dawn from its pit of fire is ascending
lighting domains of clouds, currents, blue swells.
(From The Death of Kapene Kuke)
David Eggleton is a true poet of Oceania, integrating the social, natural and historical threads of our maritime hemisphere. Emerging from the northern and southern border zones of Polynesia, his poems have extended the English language to new places and changed it in the process. By avoiding the big statement, he has made the big statement. In their breadth and ambition, the poems collected in Respirator are comparable to the origin myths found within the Canto General of Pablo Neruda, and achieve the same physical, lyrical intensity as Derek Walcott. While there are plenty of poems here to divert and amuse that dart brilliantly over contemporary culture, there is a centre and gravitas that provide a complementary strength and maturity.
It is my pleasure and honour to launch this Poet Laureate collection. I commend to you Respirator, the works of David Eggleton, poet of Oceania.