Lifting the Island: Poems

AWARD-WINNING POET • AUTHOR OF ELEVEN POETRY COLLECTIONS

FORMER POET LAUREATE OF NEW ZEALAND

David Eggleton explores the voices of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia in his latest collection, LIFTING THE ISLAND

“This is vital, elastic, expertly handled language in a Pacific voice of cultural and musical sensibility, poetry to be spoken aloud or in the mind.”–Cilla McQueen, MNZM, and former New Zealand Poet Laureate

This own-voices collection is a kind of lyrical world map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious.

Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

David Eggleton has published eleven poetry collections as well as several chapbooks and a number of other books. A poet, writer, critic, and performer, he has also released recordings of his poetry set to music by a variety of musicians and composers. He is the former editor of New Zealand’s leading literary journal, Landfall, and the current editor of Landfall Review Online. His poetry collection, The Conch Trumpet, won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2016. Also in 2016, he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. In 2018 he held the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai‘i. He was the official New Zealand Poet Laureate from August 2019 to August 2022. He currently lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.