Lush celebration
The new collection Edgeland and other poems, by Dunedin’s David Eggleton, has much to live up to. His previous collection,
The Conch Trumpet,
won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Elsewhere, Eggleton’s versemaking has also brought him the Pen Best First Book of Poetry Award, London’s Time Out
Street Entertainer of the Year Award and Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
His work has been marked by its rich cadences, verbal dexterity and explorations of life on the cusp of geography and social change. Edgeland and other poems marks a vibrant celebration of the themes and language Eggleton holds dear.
Divided into five sections, the collection opens with an edgy examination of Auckland, defined by the author as a “cloud-city of the South Pacific”. Here lush tempos carry us through an exploration of different urban spaces. In verses devoted to volcanoes, the Waita¯ kere Ranges, Ta¯ maki Drive, Devonport and the Hauraki Gulf, Eggleton lays landscape down poetically, the terrestrial composed from a heady mix of description, mythology, history, environmental residue and rhythmic reframing.
Take, for instance, the opener to the poem,
Hauraki: “Dark as flax cloaks stained with ash is the isthmus . . . ”
Following sections, such as Mirihiku and the emotive
Spidermoon, expand the authorial examination of geographical spaces at the edge of the world. Lake Wakatipu, The Catlins and the West Coast, as well as points across the Tasman like Moreton Bay, are brought lyrically to life.
Meanwhile, the concluding sections deepen Eggleton’s poetic discourse about what it means to be on the periphery of existence, into peoples, profiles and psychological restlessness. Epitomising these things is the penultimate poem, The Escapologist which pits Houdini and psychic Mina Stinson Crandon against one another in a verse-like
Survivor duel.