We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“RESPIRATOR – A POET LAUREATE COLLECTION, 2019-2022” by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “SAY I DO THIS – Poems 2018-2022” by C.K.Stead (Auckland University Press, $NZ35); “PAST LIVES” by Leah Dodd (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)
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David Eggleton is a poet wide in his interests, fecund in his output, imaginative in his conceptions, skilled in both lyricism and satire and always ready to find use for canonical quotations which he alters or turns to his own use. His interests in the Pacific, the sea, animal life, the environment, colonialism and the ills of an industrial society are well known. Often his published poems are better read to an audience than read by a solitary reader. They are ripe for performance, joying in the complexity and sheer fun of sounds. The poems that make up Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, 2019-2022 were written (mainly) in the four years that Eggleton was New Zealand’s poet laureate – years that saw the pandemic (Covid 19 etc) and other woes.
A respirator is something that helps one to breathe. Why is this collection called Respirator? The answer is found in one section of Eggleton’s “Rahui: Lockdown Journal”. After dealing with the restrictions, denials and fears brought on by the pandemic, the final line is “A poem is a kind of respirator” – something that helps us breathe in difficult times. Poetry revives or energises us.
Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, is divided into seven distinct sections. Pardon me if I walk through this collection section by section. It might seem a very pedestrian thing for a critic of poetry to do, but then the seven sections David Eggleton has devised each pick up a different strain, a different set of preoccupations, from the others. This handsome hardback has on its cover a coloured photograph of a decaying coal truck wheel in the bush [the image, with some variations, is repeated in the black-and-white headings of each section].
This icon is most relevant to the first of the seven sections, which is called CIRCLE, in which Eggleton is most concerned with the continuity of life, the circle of life. In the poem “Tomorrow”, anticipated events repeat themselves, like the eternel retour; or in the slow and repeated growth of trees in “Generations” as “the trees / are our parents’ parents, diving down / a millennium underground, bent round /and curled in a birth dream, till the years / unfold roots that twist out of rock fissures, / and climb as seedlings, tender, growing…”. But this tale of nature’s creativity has a sour conclusion as the great miracle of nature meets today’s pollution. Many poems in this section are built on imagery of darkness; of things growing or dying in the dark; the untamed swell of an Otago beach (“Otago Eight Bells”) and in “Sawmill Empire”, not a lament but a resigned acknowledgement of the fact that noble trees become human houses, buildings, furniture etc. Fittingly there are poems on the earthquake destruction of Christchurch, and on windswept valleys; leavened by the jocularity of “The Steepest Street in the World”, surely one poem ripe for public performance. Nature and what we do with it is the key to this section.
The next section RAHUI: LOCKDOWN JOURNAL is a twelve-part journal of having to stay in lockdown during the pandemic. The odour and smoke of bush fires in Oz drifts over us; then there are the first whispers of a virus originating in China. The government has to deal with it. “Jacinda arose with the down-home hippy vibe / of a primmers’s teacher, newly promoted to principal, / guiding toddlers on a bush walk during a storm, / which has suddenly grown very dark and bleak”. One is not quite sure how much Eggleton is satirising or endorsing Jacinda’s work, his tone often being jocular in addressing a difficult time. There are descriptions of deserted town centres once most people are confined indoors. … and lockdown is announced… “It’s closing time in the gardens of the West; / lamplights are burning out all over Europe; / and the virus is a riddle wrapped / in a mystery inside an enigma, / but we are assured that its code can be cracked”. (The metaphors are a bit strained here, but the poet has the fun of mixing together oft-quoted phrases, as he often does.) Easter and Anzac Day are more-or-less cancelled as people stay at home. “To venture forth for fresh air, like a witness, / is to see each person englobed in amber, on their own island, / or else in lockstep with a significant other, / or with well-exercised dogs; / and ten closer, half turned away, apprehensive, / to make a wide berth, give you the swerve like a fata morgana…” And it is in this context that Eggleton declares “A poem is a kind of respirator”
Despite being called PANDEMIC, the third section is only in part concerned with the literal pandemic. There is a poem about a rugby match, “Team Spirit,” where Eggleton enjoys playing with copious alliteration (“rains ravish ravines” etc.). The poem called “Pandemic” sees Covid as inciting a change in the country’s mood. It incites “Pandemonium. Pandemonium” and fear and anxiety when “We stay home, we stay quiet in our lanes, / lit by reflections of approaching flames. / Though clouds of uncertainty flocculate, / we know that a needle can inoculate.” “Autumn Almanac” is halfway to being rap – an almost surreal collage of events, personalities and fears; and similar is “The Tongue Trumpet”. A sequence called “A Poem for Waitangi Day” is largely satirical about the way the day is honoured, ending “… let the glacial attitudes of the Pakeha / melt like snow creatures, or ice crystals, / in the eerie green faery mist / of patupaiarehe, amid chants of atua; / then bring out the chart of Te Tiriti o Watangi, / document stained with blood and squid-ink. / A flying canoe ghostly in the sky paddles / over the whole fished up archipelago, / guided by Kupe, whose pointing finger / shines with shark oil as the stars rise.” This satire is followed by others - on such things as robot-controlled artificial friendships on-line; and radio news with its bogus urgency. The pandemic triggers many uncertainties.
The next section is a thing unto itself, a bull-rush through a number of New Zealand’s literary sacred bulls. The title OLD SCHOOL TIES is deliberately a pun. This is not the old school ties of poncey schools; but the ties the poet has with old school (or at any rate older school) writers. The section begins with great affection, nostalgia and respect for Hone Tuwhare and his habits. But this is followed by a very rude (and very funny) poem “Dear Reader”, which is a blast at C.K.Stead who, for his fastidious way of criticising others and in effect belittling them, is designated as “The drive-by, take-down guy, with silver hatchets / and bloody scalps stacked in the trophy cabinet”. “Sargeson Towers” is a panorama of Auckland’s North Shore bohemianism in the 1950s, with all the poets and scribblers of the time named, but with A.R.D.Fairburn taking over. In part a work of nostalgia, but perhaps with a mild undertone of mockery at these old school geezers and at the restrictions that were in place in the 1950s. “On First Looking Into James K Baxter’s Collected Letters” reads mainly as contempt for a mood that faded into inanity in the 1960s. The 1960s were Eggleton’s teenage years, so he gives his own loose and engaging memories of being a teenager in Auckland in the 1960s and its now-passe ideas in “Sounds of the Sixties”. “Seven Old Bastards of Auckland” begins like Baudelaire but becomes a right chastising of the old booze-and-chunder culture that was still around in the 1960s. And there are poems about teenage smoking, and war movies they saw as teenagers and memories of Auckland’s west-coast beaches. To conclude this section there is one of Eggleton’s “list” poems and one of his master works, “The Great New Zealand Novel”, a wonderful run through New Zealand novels and types of novels and pretentiousness in novels and yet coming to a positive conclusion about the value of New Zealand novels. Very heartening for avid readers.
A very different world is found in the fifth section THE DEATH OF KAPENE KUKE, where Eggleton moves into the Pacific and its culture. “The Death of Kapene Kuke” is an anti-colonial revisionist account of the death of Captain Cook, as “Cook brought capitalism and Adam Smith’s saws, / rather than reciprocity and sharing of gifts, / and he was not the great white god Lono, / but one speared through and smoked till flesh seared off, / as the rain dogs ran with the grey rain gods.” When he moves into poems about Honolulu, Waikiki and other locations, the poet poised between lyricism and anger at their degradation. The most poignant poem in this mode is “Lifting the Island” where idealised views and daydreams of the island have been washed away; where “The beachcomber who once sailed the seven seas, / goes from bin to bin with freestyle hands, / grave as a mandarin in abstract thought. / Ripe stink of garbage …/ He wears nothing but faded and ripped shorts….. / The old gods are curios, remade in the bar / as the grinning wooden handles of beer taps.” There is a degree of ambiguity in Eggleton’s approach in some poems in this section. He is lyrical about the waves and mountains of the islands and the ways of life that once were. But he is uneasily aware that he himself is part of the tourist influx and therefore implicit in the degradation of culture he sees. He is angry about colonialism and yet is part of the process. This is he honesty of his presentation.
Yet the next section, WHALE SONG is far more straightforward and lyrical in describing joyfully the many types of whale that swim and wander in the Pacific– a pure delight in their diversity. Take for one example “Orcas”, which begins “Hail to the Orca, carnivore, apex predator. / We are the killer whales from Antarctica. / We like it cold because then we go fast, / Under the icebergs, beneath polar winds. / Listen to the icepack grind; listen to gales moan. / Hail to the orca, carnivore, apex predator….” and continuing into their habits and lives. There are also poems about the traditional (pre-colonial) connections of whales with human beings as in the poem “Whale Road” where “The Whales are wayfinders for our vaka, / the whales are wayfinders for our life raft, / for our dinghy, for our yacht, for our ferry, for our peace ship, / for our trawler, for our migrant boat, for our cruise ship, / for our container ship, for our oil tanker, for our naval ship - / and underneath them all, the holy holy holy whale swims.” BUT, as the poem “Endangered Ocean Blues” makes clear, all the varieties of whale are now threatened with extinction. And the last whale-poem “Whale Psalm” sees the threatened whale as facing destruction in the same way that human beings are destroying themselves in wars and other human conflicts. The whale is the calm sanity that human beings require for their souls’ salvation. These whale poems are straightforward in their limpid language. Without suggesting they are only for children, I hope that some enterprising teachers introduce these whale poems to their pupils.
And so to the seventh and final section THE WALL, which is the most consistently satirical in terms of social issues. “Deepwater Horizon” has a go at offshore oil-drilling. “The End of History” mocks Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism losing its hold, liberal democracy was the only way forward – but alas, as all historians know, history never ends, and Eggleton concludes his poem with “The blow-up globe was punctured and hissed / with escaping breath as another dream / began to count down to lift-off; / and then we were stuck in the 1990s, / with a long night coming on, / and very few left to sing revolution’s song.” Do I question some of Eggleton’s prosody? Sometimes. Especially when he is being satirical, his exuberance runs away with him, and the point of a poem gets lost (see “The Wall” and especially Gorgon, where his rhymes and word-play become the whole course of the poem.) On the other hand there are more focused poems like “My Phone” – an sort of incantation perhaps best read to an audience – which is a witty smack at those little electronic beasts we now all carry with us. And the surprising “Ode to Iggy Pop” does bash out some sort of dignity from the alternative musician, be he “Protested specimen in witness protection, / he’s a smorgasbord, a feast, torso all jelly, / tongue like a gherkin, eyes like pickled onion. / Going to see the man known as Iggy Pop, / in a world where corporates quarry rock, / guitars going for it and drummer’s mighty hammer, / Iggy revs that tongue to slobber and stammer. / He’s the passenger who will ride and ride.” “Homage to Fahrenheit 451” is a blast against the digitisation of books, the removing books from libraries, the philistinism with regard to books and how the ancient of books are no longer nurtured. As I’ve already remarked, Eggleton has a proclivity for producing his own versions of canonical phrases. Thus in “Homage to Fahrenheit 451”, we get “Books are noble animals but have to be put down, / because about suffering they are never wrong”. For the record, the final poem in this collection, “What the Future Holds” is a kind of raising-hands-in-surrender at the future with a que sera sera what-the-hell vibe. There are only so many problems that a poet can address. Or ameliorate.
I know. I know. I’ve tracked my way through Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection like a bibliographer dutifully classifying and ticketing the contents. Sorry, but I found no better way to express my enjoyment at the variety of tones and issues addressed in David Eggleton’s production. It’s solid, thoughtful, funny, insightful, sombre and very, very readable. Okay, I carp at Eggleton’s occasional letting his verbal exuberance run away with him (also known as losing the plot). But what do you expect? Perfection?
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By pure chance (no kidding) the next collection of poems to come to my attention was C.K.Stead’s latest collection Say I Do This – Poems 2018-2022. Now in his 91st year, Stead has produced 17 collections of poetry in a long career, as well as a having published a “Collected Poems” (not to mention his many novels, short stories, memoirs and essays). In an end-note he says that he was going to call this collection Last Poems, in the knowledge that he will not be with us for much longer; but he changed his mind after recalling a passage from Allen Curnow that “so long as there’s a next, there’s no last.” So Say I Do This it became, dedicated to his wife Kay. Stead has a very simple way of categorising poems in this collection. They are “Home”, poems set in New Zealand; “Away”, poems built on his time overseas or imaginary places overseas; and “Friends’, being concerned with people he knows or has known. It is no irreverence to say these are the poems of a very old man, and his ideas are mainly based on past experience.
In the Home section, the opening poem “To be continued perhaps” is a poem of resignation – enjoying the dying of the light without worrying too much how the world is going on. “Tohunga Crescent” laments the fact that his across-the-road neighbours, Allen Curnow and his wife, are no longer around, and the neighbourhood is degenerating. “Ode to Autumn” tells us that “I lead a life of quiet medication / longing for foreign shores, adventure and death” and “After surgery” tells us that “Death will be not unwelcome though I’d hoped / for a friendlier exit” before he hears the chimes at midnight and babbles o’ green fields as he recalls childhood memories. His address to his wife “Birthday Tercets for Kay” speculates among other things on how they will die. Some neighbourhood poems have a certain degree of soulfulness, such as “To ‘Amnesia, Muse of Deletions’ ” with its closing line “do the dead forget their friends?”; or the long memoir “Mary” where a neighbour’s death ends with speculation on Nature hailing her. “Haiku: Audiology” is about decaying hearing and the sound illusions such as “cicada / tinnitus making each day / ‘one summer’ ”. Yes, these are certainly an old man’s poetry, but they are neither self-pitying nor regretful. Stead shows great interest in, and clearly enjoys, the flora and fauna around him with a number of poems about the birds in his locality and their ways. “Pastoral Kaiwaka, 1941”, one of his retro poems apparently rooted in childhood, is a genuinely witty take on life as was, with a neat dose of anthropomorphism put to good use.
The great farewell to Home is “Poem in October”, borrowing one of Dylan Thomas’s titles and changing Thomas’s opening line “It was my thirtieth year to heaven” to “It was my ninetieth year to heaven” as he farewells the city and flowers and small delights and acknowledges that death is commonplace anyway, concluding that he will say “Kia ora for having me. Stay safe. Go well” as he goes – a purely banal statement but then maybe death itself is banal. (Personally I prefer Henry James’ designation of death as “The Distinguished Thing”.)
In the Away section, the poems about overseas seem more in the nature of distant memories reconstructed rather than more directly recalled – thus his vignettes of Menton. And many poems set elsewhere are historical or legendary places which – presumably – Stead has not stayed in, as in “The Death of Orpheus” about the mythical demi-god, or “October 16 1817, Angostura 5pm” a tragic anecdote from the era of Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation. Likewise the poem “Impromptu: Afghanistan”, which chastises the U.S.A. for creating pointless chaos in Asia, ending with the statement “America we love you / (sometimes) but / why so daft, so thick / so unwilling to learn?” Four “Psalms of Judas” and a poem called “The Challenge”, about the recent burning of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, function as proof that Stead is still a convinced atheist, with much contempt for religion, especially Christianity.
Finally the section called Friends, which is as much about acquaintances or in some cases anecdotes about once-met strangers. There are some heartfelt farewells to the dead (“A Sonnet for Peter Wells”). The poem for Kevin Ireland is a blokey thing remembering the ingredients of a dinner as taught them by Frank Sargeson. Another poem to Kevin Ireland gives a more detailed account of their long friendship. The poem to Fleur Adcock hails her for bringing to Stead’s attention poem-worthy things in nature. The poem to John Berryman considers Berryman’s suicide, implying that all things (and people) pass like the animals now becoming extinct. Some poems require more personal knowledge to fully understand what is being said – that is, they rely on things that could be decoded only by an in-group. In “A Sonnet ending on a note of uncertainty”, concerning Seamus Heaney, is Stead implying that he does not approve of Heaney’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? It seems so. The poem on Keri Hulme is again very questioning, with Stead (correctly, I think) again raising that matter of violence directed against children in The Bone People. Iris (an anecdote about Iris Murdoch) seems light common-room chatter. But there are more deeply felt poems about the dead or the very old.
There you once again have from me a description and cataloguing of a collection of poetry rather than a real critique. What can I say? Say I Do This is Stead as we already know him – sometimes combative, often ticking off the foolishness of the world, but in this case being aware that he has already strutted and fretted his hour on the stage. One thing is very certain – save perhaps for the odd in-joke, Stead writes clearly, only rarely dealing in ambiguity and never dabbling in wilful obscurity. From that perspective, this is a very rewarding collection.
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Turning from the work of two very experienced and older poets, I come to the debut collection of a younger poet. Leah Dodd has hitherto appeared only in smaller poetry publications. Her style is very free verse and most of her poems are presented in loose fragments scattered randomly across the page. Sometimes it is hard to see the reason for the separation of words in this way. Most titles are presented in lower case and one of two poems are unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness, as in the poem “spawning season”. Some poems begin with an idea but then wander off in other directions like a stream getting lost, as in “ilovekeats69”.
And that, I promise, is the end of my dyspeptic grumbles because I quickly discovered that Leah Dodd is a very astute observer of the scene, witty - sometimes hilarious – and not falling into traps of self-pity. Sure, there are poems about break-ups, but the poem “summer” suggests a kind of taking-it-on-the-chin when a breakup has happened. Other poems imply a desire for a partner, but they are treated with irony and in terms of fantasy, as in “the only way out of my student loan is to marry ex-FRIENDS star Matthew Perry” where, in her dreams, she is considering dating a Hollywood star after a breakup. Similarly, and equally ironically “marry me (on Runescape)” is also a fantasy about hooking up with someone. Even more irony dominates “Tips for lockdown wellness”, seeking a fantasy protective figure but in this case a tiger! Irony is one of Dodd’s main weapons even outside breakup situations, as when the poem “revolution” proposes that bats should replace people for our own good
Sometimes Dodd, a young woman, easily recalls childhood or teenage situations, as in “Mt Eden 2005”, concerned with painful ways of removing pimples. “When you want to be a mermaid so bad it hurts” perhaps (but only perhaps) suggests that a young girl’s daydreams cannot ever really by fulfilled. And “masterclass” is the mixed memories of learning the piano. (The blurb tells me that Leah Dodd is a classically-trained pianist, though an end-note says that this poem is also inspired by Pink Floyd.) “Memphis Belle” is a memoir of being billeted in a less-then-desirable motel while taking part in a high school Shakespeare fest; and “guided hypnosis” is cooling off after a party.
An almost surreal poem “I am the ghost of the IKEA futon couch” is an anthropomorphic account of furniture becoming a box of memories – probably the most fully imaginative of Dodd’s poems in this collection. Dodd touches on conservation and the environment in “0800 SEE ORCA” lamenting the orca’s death, but conservation is not one of her major concerns. Observing the local scene is. Scattered through this collection there are four “bus poems”, which are literally about riding on the bus in parts of Wellington but which involve daydreams, reveries and memories during the ride
Which brings me to the most poignant of her poems - and the least ironical. The poem “clot” appears to be a poem about an early miscarriage. But one of her best poems, “tether”, about looking after a baby, understands both how difficult it is and yet how compelling: “he’ll cry if I leave. Little limpet / but oh, I love the closeness. It slips / so quickly once we were connected / by a vein and two arteries ever since / we drift. I take these gifts with grace”. “clucky” is also about baby. It is implied in “muscle memory” that she is raising the child alone. And in “gig people” about behaviour of crowd at rock concert “we joke about the baby being home on his own / to three different people”. (I hope she really was joking.) “Last Call Nigel” observes the baby developing into toddler-hood. And in “stone fruit” “he is laid down, tucked in, / his lamp switched off / and curtains drawn to block / morning light / and he sleeps ? little prince, / the one who wasn’t planned / but wasn’t unexpected.”
The nature of society and trends are examined. “Patched gang members in the Maori Affairs Committee Room, 1979” is really a poem about the disjunction of Maori street culture and highbrow Pakeha culture with lines like “the council blasts Debussy / and Mozart loud / outside the library / where brown kids linger / and drink and fight / like white culture down the throat.” “West Coast School of Rock”, opens “It was a time of Empire Records and The Runaways / black miniskirts and steel-capped boots / gigs at an emptied warehouse / where kids learnt riffs and / soaked their black tees with sweat”. It reads like reportage with punchlines suggesting a self-destructive fad. Is the style intended to be deadpan? I leave you to judge.
And so to what will be the piece de resistance for many readers. This is the outrageously funny “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now”, with a list of all the most barmy suggestions of what she would do. Food turns up in a number of her poems, “cow fund” being a fantasia about raising a cow to be able to produce expensive cheese. But “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now” tops all the others.
A short judgement? This is a fully formed collection from a poet who has a keen eye and an engaging style. One of the year’s best.
