Lifting the Island

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 catalogue of flora, fauna, and artefacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humour 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.