Back and forwards

Witty and reflective observations on life, death and hard times.

RESPIRATOR: A Poet Laureate collection 2019-2022, by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, $35)

“A poem is a kind of respirator,” says David Eggleton, something that helps us breathe. Poetry revives and energises us in difficult times, and this capacious hardback collection was largely written during the Covid pandemic. Eggleton devotes a whole section to his personal experience in lockdown. Exuberant in style, loving word play and having a clear view of the world, his interests are broad. There’s a clutch of poems on the Pacific, with an anti-colonial view in The Death of Kapene Kuke. This is followed by the lyrical sequence on whales, Whale Song, so pellucid in expression that it should be enjoyed by a wide audience. Then there is satire as he damns offshore oil drilling and mocks Francis Fukuyama’s End of history thesis. Perhaps most controversial are the poems presented together as Old School Ties. As well as rejoicing in some New Zealand literature, he also takes on Baxter and Fairburn and, in a chastising way, CK Stead. This is a very rich mix.

SAY I DO THIS – POEMS 2018-2022, by CK Stead (Auckland University Press, $35)

Absolutely no disrespect is meant in saying that CK Stead’s poems in Say I Do This are an old man’s poems. Now in his 91st year, Stead tells us he was going to call this collection Last Poems in the knowledge that he will not be with us for much longer. Death appears in a number of these poems. 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”. But Stead is not a man to be gloomy. He rejoices in local flora and fauna. He is happy to affirm his steady atheism in Psalms for Judas and The Challenge. And he has interesting poetic anecdotes to tell of overseas experience and good friends, affirming friendship with fellow poets Kevin Ireland and Fleur Adcock, but questioning Seamus Heaney and Keri Hulme. Stead’s greatest asset? He writes clearly and unambiguously what he means.

PAST LIVES, by Leah Dodd (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25)

Leah Dodd’s debut collection is one of those signs that there is hope for the future of poetry. Once you get used to free verse and poems presented in loose fragments scattered across the page, you realise that Dodd is a very astute observer of the scene, witty and not falling into traps of self-pity. There may be poems about breakups or the loss of a lover, but they are treated with irony and a takingit-on-the-chin attitude. This doesn’t mean flippancy. Patched gang members in the Māori Affairs Committee Room, 1979 probes real social issues. In writing about looking after her baby son and watching him grow to toddlerhood there is genuine poignancy, not sentimental but realistic, as in the poems tether, clucky, Last Call Nigel and stone fruit. And when the wit is unleashed, it can be uproariously funny. Read the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now without laughing and your sense of humour is sorely lacking. ▮