The Conch Trumpet

Overview

Calling to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand, The Conch Trumpet sounds the signal to listen close, critically, and "in alert reverie." David Eggleton's reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes, and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, and the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world—the thisness of things: cloud whispers brush daylight's ear, fern question marks form a bush encore, forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. In this latest collection, David Eggleton is court jester, philosopher, lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud.

Author Biography

David Eggleton is a performance poet and a writer whose many awards include six-time Book Reviewer of the Year at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the PEN Best First Book of Poetry, the Robert Burns Fellowship, and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, London TimeOut's 1985 Street Entertainer of the Year. He is the author of Time of the Icebergs and the editor of the prestigious New Zealand literary journal Landfall.