Poetry reviews by Hamesh Wyatt

RESPIRATOR: A POET LAUREATE COLLECTION 20192022 David Eggleton

Otago University Press

David Eggleton has always known how to give the reader wordblasts. He has published 10 previous collections. The Great Kiwi Ranter is right to say poetry helps us breathe. He captures New Zealand living through a pandemic. This is a powerful artistic record of an unprecedented historical moment. These poems take us back there.

Respirator is a big hardcovered book, more than 180 pages. Of course Eggleton keeps the reader on their toes. Excellent, rewarding surprises include thoughts on offshore drilling. His takes on Baxter, Fairburn and Stead are brilliant and understated.

“On First Looking Into James K Baxter’s Collected Letters” concludes:

… Stretch and Ratso went in dead march in October,

bringing up the rear of He¯mi’s funeral,

processional, reverential, though themselves 400 kilometres north of Wanganui in Auckland at the time, asleep, dead drunk at the kitchen table of a crash pad that crashed long ago.

Respirator stands alongside his best.

FACE TO THE SKY Michele Leggott

Auckland University Press

Another New Zealand Poet Laureate is Michele Leggott. She recently released Mezzaluna (AUP, 2020), her selected poems over nine collections. With tenderness and courage her 11th collection finds one of our best haunted by ancestry and personal memories. Face to the Sky has a confessional style that tells stories of love and loss, some reflected in the art and writings of Emily Cumming Harris.

From “Dark Emily”:

… I stared at the vertical mountain | collapsing memory

willing it to lie down | someone calling out

and play with us | a brother or a younger one three small bodies | look in care | the scrawled name at the top of the photograph

three dark shapes | how they got a T from the first initial

between ship and mountain | but see how it could be a J

The last few collections may look similar, but this one has a more forceful, elegant feel. Face to the Sky will leave the reader with a smile, a tear in the eye and a heart that is full. There is nothing wrong with laments of past mistakes and shifting between being vulnerable and completely in charge.

BITER Claudia Jardine

Auckland University Press

Claudia Jardine had a shared trip with Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae in AUP New Poets 7 (2020). Biter is her debut collection of verse. She brings together fresh translations of erotic Greek epigrams. Love and sex fill these pages. Jardine produces a rich, glitzy idiosyncratic tapestry that weaves together the ancient and the modern.

Jardine is a PakehaMaltese poet, musician and classicist who serves up poems on memories, student days, and dogs. Biter is a pretty rough, beautiful thing.

“Jardine on Auden, Williams and Hammond on Bruegel the Elder”:

a boy falls from the sky

a man paints an unaffected context for him to fall into

two men write poems concerned with the notnoticing

and another man paints a suggestive dribble this time with birdfolk in profile looking beyond the event

so many ways for man to say ‘I did not see’

well, I did and I could have done it better

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT YOUR MOTHER Louise Wallace

Te Herenga Waka University Press

Louise Wallace grew up in Gisborne, but now lives with us on the Otago Peninsula. This latest little book concentrates on motherhood, voices and experiences. A light look may only see a few words scattered across the page, but repeated reads find a stirring and an unhurried, introspective look back over what is important. Mother has a gentle and undeniable propulsion.

“crave”:

weak and irritable the self flickers time

is like a heaviness on your chest you crave

but each moment disappears

before you can hold it you yearn for night to head off

into it to occupy a bed alone

This Is A Story About Your Mother rings so true.

CALAMITIES! Jane Arthur

Te Herenga Waka University Press

Calamities! is Jane Arthur’s second spinecracking collection. Craven (THWUP, 2019) won the Jessie Mackay Prize at the New Zealand Book Awards in 2020. This is compelling, unsettling and unsettled.

Some find poetry dreamy; not this one. Arthur is direct, sharp and precise. Few do it better. From a little bookshop in Wellington, her verse is full of vivid ideas and bold moves. Her sequence “The Bear” is delightful.

“Distant Planets:

Now we can see distant planets in crisp detail, making them seem like our birthright.

If all of us stood outside and screamed on three, would the sound carry? Would it make the planets shrivel and recoil? Would they release their fiery comets to shut us up?

Calamities! will keep your head spinning.

Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry