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 paens 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

Bind: paperback

Pages: 124

Dimensions: 170 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 20-02-2015

Much of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present 'hurtling globalisation's highway' where 'Google tells Google that Google saves'. As he says, 'I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.' In this time of winebars and infotainment, 'Ngati Cappucino and Ngati Bogan' stalk the streets bent beneath hoodies and 'boxy four-wheel-drives plane through the wet' piloted by 'yummy mummies'. Titles of poems reflect the absurdities of 21st century existence: 'Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card' riffs off an ad in the New Yorker, while 'Not for Human Consumption' and 'Twenty Second Century' hint at the ecological chaos of the modern world. Name-droppers, debt-dodgers, ghettoised gods and 'Vern Acular, that good keen bloke' all make an appearance, as does the lost five-cent coin. Poems set in Suva, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin locate this book firmly in the South Pacific. Eggleton traverses the country: from Cantabrian landscapes of 'a geology sculpted into fists' and Dunedin 'tipped out of a colonial toy-box' to North Island summer idylls where you could 'follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut by the soaraway kite of blue sky'. Nationality and 'kiwiness' are under investigation. This is no mere intellectual exercise as through it all thrums the steady beat of life.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 88

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Featured Artists: Chris Corson-Scott, Heather Straka, Jenna Packer, Samuel Harrison Writers: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Nick Ascroft, Claire Baylis, Miro Bilbrough, Victoria Broome, Iain Britton, Owen Bullock, Christine Burrows, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Joanna Cho, Stephanie Christie, Makyla Curtis, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Riemke Ensing, Ciaran Fox, Michael Gould, Shen Haobo, Paula Harris, René Harrison, Stephen Higginson, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Amanda Hunt, Anna Jackson, Ted Jenner, Anne Kennedy, Erik Kennedy, Jessica Le Bas, Wes Lee, Michele Leggott, Carolyn McCurdie, Robert McLean, Fardowsa Mohamed, Kavita Ivy Nandan, Emma Neale, Piet Nieuwland, Claire Orchard, Bob Orr, Jenny Powell, Chris Price, Helen Rickerby, Ron Riddell, L.E. Scott, Jo-Ella Sarich, Iain Sharp, Charlotte Simmonds, Peter Simpson, Tracey Slaughter, Laura Solomon, Barry Southam, Matafanua Tamatoa, Philip Temple, Dunstan Ward, Elizabeth Welsh, Sue Wootton, Mark Young, Karen Zelas.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2017

The poetry in David Eggleton’s new collection possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poet’s recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode. Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars while simultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and ‘repurposes’ high visual culture and demotic aural culture. Edgeland offers a tragicomic and surreal skewering of the cons, swindles, posturings and flaws of damaged people on the make, dislocating the reader with high speed jinks and swerves. A satirical eye interrogates ‘data’, media bilge, opinion, social change, extreme experience, and worst-case-scenario extrapolations. A menagerie of vivid characters burst off the page – including the man who mistook the moon for a candy bar, instigators, prestidigitators, procurators, promulgators, Zorro and Governor Grey – alongside a survey of 35 types of beard, an ode to ooze, metadada, Gordon Ramsay’s pan-sizzled bull’s pizzle, a Baxterian moa, and various other waka jumpers hailing from Jafaville to Jack’s Blowhole. Edgeland is a dazzling display of polychromatic virtuosity, teeming with irrepressible wordplay, startling imagery and anarchic wit, from one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets

Bind: paperback

Pages: 112

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

What is invariably terrific in Eggleton’s poetry is not only the relish of his attack, but the flash of lyric underwing colour as he dives on his prey. – IAN WEDDE David Eggleton, Poet Laureate of Aotearoa 2019–21, has published nine poetry collections, and now, finally, comes a ‘Best Of ’. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems is a hardback compendium of the poet’s own selection from 35 years of published work, together with a handful of new poems. Cover art by Nigel Brown. About David Eggleton’s poetry: Eggleton’s word-blasts remain consistently gratifying. His poetry’s ... endlessly imaginative, it’s funny, [and] intellectually rewarding … Every poem is a snapshot of the culture in action. – NICK ASCROFT 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 … vivid, fizzy and smart. – GRANT SMITHIES

Bind: hardback

Pages: 314

Dimensions: 220 x 170 mm

Publication Date: 25-03-2021

‘The scope and invention of these poems is simply dazzling.’ – Anne Kennedy Respirator is a sumptuous celebration of David Eggleton’s tenure as the nation’s poet-at-large during his time as Aotearoa NZ Poet Laureate (2019–22). In this collection of probing, kaleidoscopic and richly sensuous poems, Eggleton explores how the social changes and upheavals of the past four extraordinary years manifested in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the impact of living through a pandemic to ecological concerns, technological changes, and shifting viewpoints about identity and global consumerism. Respirator stands as a powerful artistic record of an unprecedented historical moment. "Australia’s heat map in January glowed every which way, red, purple, black, and our skies were made yellow by trans-Tasman smoke, while scarcely less fraught were dog days of February, as arrivals drifted through airport duty-free, in a haze of competing perfume spritzes, and reports came of a strange virus out of Wuhan, pale horse and pale rider." — ‘Rāhui: Lockdown Journal'

Bind: hardback

Pages: 192

Dimensions: 170 x 220 mm

Publication Date: 20-03-2023