Review: Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019 - 2022

I remember taking part in a poetry reading with David Eggleton and Lauris Edmond in the late 1980s. The venue was the walkway above the stairwell in the student union building at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. The idea (not uncommon at the time) was to present impromptu readings in unexpected spaces so, we shouted our poems at passing students; some paused to listen; more hurried on. Eggleton had a following, here and overseas, as ‘the Kiwi ranter;’ Edmond was probably the most popular New Zealand poet of the decade; I was the ring ’un and had organised the gig.

From Kiwi ranter to poet laureate is not perhaps as big a step as it might appear. Both busker-poet and poet laureate must be able (at least at times) to project a public voice, a voice which (without overly hectoring or overly dumbing down) speaks to a broad audience on matters of current concern. Possessing his own distinctive version of that public voice has always been one of Eggleton’s strengths, one shared with recent UK poet laureates Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, and with his successor as local laureate, Chris Tse.

Eggleton’s handsomely produced new collection, Respirator, written during his three-year tenure, attests to that voice, that strength. The collection is organised into seven roughly equal sections: Circle, Rāhui, Pandemic, Old School Ties, The Death of Kapene Kuke, Whale Song and The Wall. The sections cover a smorgasbord of pressing and perennial national topics and preoccupations, including Covid, climate change, national identity, neo-liberalism, the historical past, literary history, Facebook, the Pacific, poetry, whales, the Christchurch earthquake, books, the future and much more. If poets really are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley claimed, Eggleton is definitely on the unacknowledged board. 

The central conceit of the volume, highlighted by its title, is contained in the final line of Rāhui: Lockdown Journal: “A poem is a kind of respirator.” It’s a line I hope will be much quoted. A poem (‘something made’ from the Greek word poíēma) is also, literally and metaphorically, a breathing device and, during lock-down, writing poems was clearly for Eggleton a survival machine, too. And we have desperately needed, and still need, all that poems can offer to breathe/survive in what might really be “closing time in the gardens of the West.” (That resonant phrase from Cyril Connolly is just one of the multifarious allusions, the cultural flotsam, that flash past the reader on the poems’ rhythmic rip – allusions to The Cars, Shakespeare, Dylan, Dinah Hawken, The Kinks, Keats, movies, Yeats, The Incredible String Band, Hone Tuwhare ….

Hone opens section four, Old School Ties, which, as its punning title suggests, riffs on local literary figures from ‘back in the day.’ Of these, Tuwhare, “Poet of the brouhaha, of the feed of oysters,” is unequivocally admired for his integrity, variety, generosity, for being the “Poet of the hug, poet of the hongi.” His Pākehā contemporaries – Allen Curnow, C.K. Stead, Frank Sargeson, Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn et al – fare less well, their work, you could say, proving less effective respirators.

Stead is dealt to in Dear Reader: “The great white shark under mackerel skies;” “Gate-keeper, chucker-out, culture-bouncer.” The others (plus Stead and “all the Sons of Sarge”) are marooned in culturally exclusive Sargeson Towers, a poem that ends with its finger firmly pointed to the present: “and now only brand-new Sargeson Towers stand / as deluxe living for those with cash in hand.” The poet laureate, like the Kiwi ranter, takes few prisoners.

Eggleton’s poetic has always owed a strong debt to the Beats. His poems, taking the pulse of the time, often work through loosely linked single-line shots or runs of richly loaded metaphor. The results here are exhilarating, mind-bending, heart-thumping. Gulped down too quickly, however, the effect can be a bit numbing. Two poems a day might be the recommended dose.

 Reviewed by Harry Ricketts