David Eggleton is a poet of Papālagi, Rotuman and Tongan descent, with ancestral connections to the villages of Motusa and Ma'ufanga. He lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems was published by Otago University Press in 2021. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His most recent poetry collection, Lifting the Island, in which 'The Navigators' appears, was published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California in September 2025.
Eggleton comments: 'I wrote this poem in Aotearoa for my brother Tonu Shane Stevens, who lives and works as an artist and carver in Hawai'i, as an inspiration for his carvings and artworks. On our mother's side, we come from an ocean people. Our Rotuman grandfather, our ma'piag fa, Tonu Sitiveni, was a canoe-maker, a carpenter, a boat-builder from the village of Motusa in Itu District on the island of Rotuma. Our grandmother Usenia, our kui fefine, was from Ma'ufanga near Nuku'alofa in Tonga. She swam and dived and sailed between the islands of Tonga and Rotuma and Fiji back in the early twentieth century. Usenia had twelve children, and our mother, Kerela Sitiveni, was her youngest. Our father Bill Eggleton was a New Zealand airman, who met our mother when stationed at the RNZAF airbase in Suva, Fiji. In Tonga, master navigators were known as the kaivai, or water-eaters. I wanted this poem to be a form of continuity through time and space, across the va, between generations, acknowledging the navigators who took their bearings from the different winds and sea-currents and star-paths that were learnt off by heart, for ocean-going voyages that once connected a thousand islands across the Moana.'
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