The Conch Trumpet
The Conch Trumpet calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It 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 paeans to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, 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.
– from ‘Nor’wester Flying’
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.
David Eggleton
David Eggleton (Rotuman Fijian/Tongan/Pākehā) has published ten previous poetry collections. He is a six-time winner of the Montana Reviewer of the Year, and a former Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. He received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry in 2016, the same year that The Conch Trumpet won the Poetry Award at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. From 2009–17, Eggleton was editor of Landfall. He received the 2018 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers’ Residency and served as the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019–22.
More About David Eggleton
The Wilder Years 
Edgeland and other poems 
Time of the Icebergs 
Respirator