The Conch Trumpet

by David Eggleton

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781877578939
Publisher:	Otago University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Pages:	124
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SHORE


The Conch Trumpet

Stars are setting westward,
other stars are rising eastward:
a handful of sparks on the horizon,
glow-worms on the roof of a cave.
Scorched grains of colour mask the reasoning power of the human swarm.
Apparitions in mist, cloaked or vanished, gone to earth,
emerge in the green heart,
the green lungs of divers.
The blueness of the tongue swells.
The sea chest thumps.
The waka is pelted by ochre dust,
by red pohutukawa, carried in a waterspout.
A centipede paddles.
Squid wreathe miles of black ink;
scuds of smutty carbon drift.
An iron-sand glaze is fired by a burning forest.
A hand coils pregnant clay.
Neutrinos pinwheel and oscillate through everything.


Ode to the Beach-Wrecked Petrel

Claws grip in gnarled rookeries.
I am brother to tuatara,
a companion to ruru.
I see a karearea rising at russet dawn and applaud; I draw breath at bees in yellow forest:
at bark syrups nuzzled between black chasms of sea and white chasms of mountain;
at the glacier's goofy foot blue with cold that slides over rocks, surfing on;
at those bevies of alpine beauties,
shimmery in sunlight with a forbidding air;
at bladdery kelp, bright green as gherkins,
cast up from under brine, bursting with salt;
and at a petrel,
getting the red carpet treatment from fallen stamens,
under twisting rata boughs.


Whakapapa of Rangi the Melody-Maker

Rangi, atua, kumara, cave spiral,
sizzling manuka soot and weka fat,
embryo whose tongue protrudes purple.

Karanga wails mingle with drizzle,
curling surf like toetoe flicking water,
and mauri is dancing in the blood.

Hineputehue embraces Tawhirimatea,
maker of storms, with her calm gourd music, so the grey sky gently weeps.

A putorino chrysalis sings to katydids,
Uenuku casts rainbows for kokopu,
a ponga forest scars with flame's moko.

A hawk tumbles through a helix of light,
but the legless lizard waits under schist,
beneath mountains' plumed albatross wings.

Rangi, uplifted, wearing a mist mantle,
floats on bier, on waka, on mana reo,
to music sweet as marrow from bone.


Sunday's Song

A tin kettle whistles to the ranges;
dry stalks rustle in quiet field prayer;
bracken spores seed dusk's brown study;
the river pinwheels over its boulders;
stove twigs crackle and race to blaze;
the flame of leaves curls up trembling.
Church bells clang, and sea foam frays;
there's distant stammers of revving engines,
a procession of cars throaty in a cutting,
melody soughing in the windbreak trees,
sheep wandering tracks, bleating alone.
Sunday sings for the soft summer tar;
sings for camellias, fullness of grapes;
sings for geometries of farming fence lines;
sings for the dead in monumental stone;
sings for cloud kites reddened by dusk —
and evening's a hymn, sweet as, sweet as,
carrying its song to streets and suburbs,
carrying its song to pebbles and hay bales,
carrying its song to crushed metal, smashed glass,
and fading in echoes of the old folks' choir.


Trails above Cook Strait

So Farewell Spit, they mocked the seasick;
Tangaroa always gets burnt by the sun.
Bird cries carried by a squall's lick echo in the ears of Captain Cook,
sunk like an anchor as fathoms break.

Waka creep past wooden islands outrun.
Fish-headed waves snare, skein by skein,
the filigrees of slithery reflection.
Cut those ropes, they said, so the sails can gather to slowly skywards their way take.

Winged flotillas fly, radiant with lyricism.
Spanked canvas shines in accumulation,
buoyed up by air like honeycombs of foam.
Waves dance in perpetual motion,
stitching the Tasman under swell of moon.


Raukura

Stone clacks on stone,
so creek lizards slither,
runnels slip through claws,
each cloud's a silver feather.
Mountains flex then soar;
the red tussock pulses.
River's mouth is drowned,
when ocean surges, green below dark vaulted forest.
The salt spray mist, violet,
granular as dust, climbs to grasp snow mountains in fog layers, and above glides the boat of the moon.


The Hook of Maui

A fanged shank yanks him from open sea.
Silken jellyfish glisten on hot iron-sand.
Mottled green light tattoos a drug-blue gaze.
Stingrays undulate along sunlit nerves.
The road snakes, and cars fishtail in gravel.
His ears are earthenware, glazed by mud.
Gold toetoe rise in hair-triggers from his armpits.
His filaments snarl round a plastic comb.
Police bolt-cutters snag on his tongue stud.
His lungs are stopped with red scoria splinters.
His lips turn black from a summit's pure snows.
His blanket's unbound clay, slid from bedrock.
Night's moths flutter from the cave of his mouth.
He dreams he's woken, wrapped in calm water.


Hei-tiki

Spindle-shank birds step on shadows;
estuary's sheen dances the tidelines.
Manuka buds into a white floor of stars,
and summer's kihikihi husks shrivel.
Sheep nuzzle hollows of particular hills;
froth billows and eddies on farm streams.
A paddock of thistles anchors the view;
all God's azure peels to an apricot blaze.
Dark water funnels a reservoir's turn from spider colonies and cocoon trails.
Cobweb fleeces, hung by spinners in orbs,
glow like ghosts, like ship's rigging.
The tuatara's eye beholds the moon's eye.
A stone hei-tiki is dug out of the earth by a settler grubbing the first garden.
Hatchlings glow and struggle from nets.
A poled kauri scow floats off the bar.
In this swamp, only buzzing of fat horse-flies over a long drop, but heat's sump soakage stews up tannins,
the dappled tarn is frog-eyed with shine,
and beeswax softens. Under the sun,
the shed at the end of the road warps.


Lighting Up in a Singer Vogue

Winter tilting on the beach groans,
and daylight's embers are buried.
A mechanical digger gouges clay for a trench to pipe the seagull's cry.
Swept by breezes, the soul rolls thin.
Surf streamers flex their vortex crests under skies whiter than albatross wings launched for horizon's arc of ocean.
Mist is flying, in pages torn from books.
Slid beneath a sparse quilt of snow,
the land's skeleton reaches to hug you.


Trampers in Westland

I Acrobatic sandflies,
  Satan's fiends,
their powers and dominions tumbling clouds driven by

  frenzied bloodlust;
living mobiles,
  demonstrating dark energies of sub-atomic particles;
we walk
  in secret peoplehood through these cross-questioning
  insect swarms.


II

We molluscs expand,
  by an ebbing tide,
dripping;
we beached seals,
  sand-encrusted ones,

    our red-rimmed eyes mournfully raised
  to the overcast skies;
with long wet hair,
  trailing seaweed,

    the puddle dripped into,
rising round our knees.


III

Solitaries
  in alert reverie,
    listening to shush, shush,
rhymes of the sea;
  feathery smears up arms,

    feet mottled salt-and-pepper,
soggy-bottomed swim-togs,
  or bikinis towel-wrapped;
perched on odd driftwood forms
  by bonfire's crackle and woosh,
omnipresent dark hills,
morepork! cry from the bush.


Fiord Haka

Ruaumoko slaps thighs, thumps torso, and groans heavily,
busting moves to rattle gravity:
needle-scratches a seismograph,
making dolphins leap for the starry.
Our echoing ship rumbles, bumps,
and the fiord wobbles up from sleep,
whaleback thrashing around midnight,
before gurgling back down to slumber,
between rockfall splashing hemmed.
By day's steepled buttresses we tramp,
next to river's muscle-tug flow west,
rain a velvet-nosed champagne wetness —
such fine balances of skimmed rainfall,
such varieties of mould and mosses,
on pathway's crumbled clay crust a dolphining fern curve, a feather flutter;
while in haphazard winks and touches broken sunlight brightens the gemmed webbings of branches, water's drift:
all misty impediments to a clarity difficult to determine in unsettlement.


Moriori Dendroglyphs

green tongues lollop round branches through wounds in bark with deep affliction like tattoos freshly fingered

surf's blind gravel spat from the sea rain streaking a small plane's windscreen as it lands on wind-flattened paddock

black waves of coal an ancient tide clenched between clay layers and just them walking in ideation

on limestone walls under kite claws

CHAPTER 2

INLAND

Syzygy

Moon dreams of moonlight,
cracking sutures of the skull open.
Mouth, moth, o moonlight, flicker.
Dance, moons of May.
Dance, moons of torch-shine.
Moon, tossed over our heads, a ball,
sails towards the net.
Scry the moon, note down marks you see on her surface reflected in still water.
Moon, round mirror,
veined solid slub, a prism.
A telescope, gibbous grim-moon,
a drinkers' moon — full, fat, cheerfully bright.
Melon moon, pregnant to many moons.
Moon conjuring mystic syzygy,
with the sun in harmony.
Moon's spectral lake, draped weightless with moonlight, gathering shadow.
Tarot moon, shuffling decks of the zodiac,
leaving runnels of shadow across her forehead.
Knight errant, his black pennant flags hung on a Golden Holden out in the scrub,
with mattock, shovel and a body,
leaning on the bonnet,
ponders the mellow moon hugely aloft and crossed by tatters of cloud,
its insignia a kind of stigma.
Moon, her abdomen girdled with stars,
she carries the teardrop of sorrow tattooed on her cheek.
All the phantom pregnancies sigh and cry.
Once in a blue moon,
everyone grows older, if you need something to cry on, here's my shoulder,
not cold, but nor does it smoulder.
Hey you, this is the room to chill in,
with its moony glow of black and blue.
Moon? City lights swallow it,
but there's the neon moon,
and the sizzle of its brand burns till dawn.


Roadkill

fleece fur feather petrol fumes hard rubber wheels and leather


Bounty

Years stack up like hymn books;
days run like rabbits,
or writhe in talons.

Soft breeze ruffles trees;
a hand reaches into a hatful of raffle tickets.

Hydrangeas, too,
sport bitter blooms still sunlit within rain's green abyss.

From trance of rubies,
gold, emeralds,
time's buzz wakes you to zebra stripes.

Pull the catch —
it remains in light;
but burning whale oil blackens the moon.


Hawk and Butterfly

As the kahu, a hairline, coasts in clear blue,
yellow gorse stretches under big rock's face,
and barbed wire's strung, enclosing our place.
So we pace at the gates of Te Papa,
made a paradise from haka to haka,
for kiwi by kiwi just passing through,
each carrying a piece of thin silver fern,
cut while you wait from corrugated tin.
Billy's boiling away, down back of beyond;
planed kauri frames a fret-sawn view.
We're listening to the rugby in lemon light,
with a longing for victory, with a dog's sigh.
Rain flutters from horses, skips off a frond,
and forms a sheen on roads in the wet;
till the sun comes out to weakly, and yet steadily, illuminate the monarch butterfly.


Minute Bodies Falling

Dawn hung on the horizon,
vistas of unending south,
skinny land between,
green ribbons rising, falling,
kilometre after kilometre,
and minute bodies falling,
tiny lives in cobs, hives or nests,
enmeshed, knitted, buckled,
midge, beetle, dragonfly aflitter,
swarms intricate above a river —
all hesitations swept away,
barbered siftings falling in place,
floss, fleece, feather —
a scrap become airborne, trembly,
as pelt or hoof or eye might be,
as fabric in turbulence, skimpy —
the whispered caress of wind-chill,
near sheer, on the move, balanced uneasily, piecing together,
flake by flake in surface tension,
gauze wrap, ivory drape,
bony frame, enshadowed hill,
ridge-top's face of thunder,
gunmetal, frost, silver,
staunch, blackened, clattery —
the gale grown, bruised and bled,
to bared teeth, evening fur,
contour after contour,
sleet working a white comb,
weight of clouds raked and torn,
streaks haphazard tumbled,
over patchwork jerseys of farms,
enmeshed, knitted, buckled,
province woven to province,
in weathered solitude of roads, lights, transmission —
staccato of hail's confetti on untidy bush from sky dishevelled,
outlandish perspectives sunk low,
in dirt seams, in leaf-scissored,
peekaboo flyaways overturned,
to turn and turn as ice,
as minute bodies that parachute to peaks —
vistas of unending south,
caked with snow at dawn.


Summer Rain

Spring trees grow collections of wands,
to conjure gently the colour green,
but in summer drum-taps bounce on water to ease a tension of the skin,
and when summer rain thunders,
then starts to dance, it is itself the romance,
prancing down the street with silvery feet,
kicking a frou-frou cancan from verandah overhang,
splashing the spatterdashes of an entrance.

Rain brings Fred Astaire's tap-tap across the roof,
before a razz of jazz is given tumultuous applause,
the ozone in the air extinguished like snuff of golden beeswax melted in candles.
Petulant petals quiver in crimson.
Rain bodies forth a spectacular earthworm welcome from hitherto undistinguished lawn.

After the storm's glance moves on,
silence fills with bird song, the sheen of datura,
sky-blue of the violet, whiteness of carnation,
scarlet glow of iceland poppies —
until the very nectarines blush, as teeth break skin,
grass dries out, heat splits pods,
and all summer breathes from the garden.


Hydrangeas

Shrubbery's floral bells.
Delicate as grace-notes, tough as wicker-knots.
Gathered to empurpled perms.
Arrayed like Parfait Amour liqueur shots.
Petalled bathing caps of a legion of synchronised swimmers,
blue in a hubbub.
The charge of the light opera brigade towards the best seats,
clustered as a violet rinse contagion.
Floating tethers of balloons in delicate pinks.
Sleepy heads of nursery beds,
cobwebbed in leafy dreams.
Powdered wigs of toffs and swells,
who lord it over a fancy-dress carnival at dusk.
Hazy as clapped chalk dusters in school monitor's grip.
Bubbly as champagne, snipped and mounted in vases on ledges.
A bobble of tennis-court fans,
applauding their own cornucopia to garden's very echo of umpire calls.
Pom-pom girls, cheerleaders of suburban rah-rah squads.
Amid stridulations of summer days,
of lark-soaring trills and cheep-cheeps,
hydra-headed and growing more heads,
crouched under masses of cumulus,
colours are your confabulations,
and flowering in that assumption,
you are the crest of the wave.


On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain

Before the movies they had waterfalls:
movement spectacular, streamed from bluffs;
gorgeous reels, unspooled in wedding-dress train;
blessings and curses that coterminously reign.
A heart surge, over stone, all spray and rivulets;
spangled dribble of some open-mouthed giant, deaf-making, whose tresses spill,
wig upon wig, to gravel mosaics between clay gullies, where the kinetic pool of its massed body weaves and ripples.
So strewn, grappling gravity, it headlong flings between ridge arms, to the blow-hole of a reptile fossil look-out, wet with glitter mined as popcorn additive for Lord of the Rings.


Catchment

Trees heave, flap, grizzle,
as wind croons rock-a-bye,
but roots grapple beneath hill crests that jag and scoop at squalls groaning like bullocks hauling trunks across ponga banners,
bracken skirts, tumbled bird balconies,
in genesis of rain spawning on creeks gurgling through gullies,
while drizzle's spit settles as mist which swirls cool bulk over paspalum,
and a weatherboard church's drummed roof.
White silks sag to shroud macrocarpas.
From slicked fronds erratic tick-tocks tell time to crumpled rock slides,
and uprisings of moisture crawl into pines to breathe vapour and breed in darkness.
Water wrangles and spouts below boulders, clambers and deepens.
It sings, and glides its fingers out of ponds sewn with green seams.
More water pulses and slithers from bogs, flicks silver along traceries of gravel, and spools over mud-banks,
punching loose humpty-dumpty clods,
until with a rush the weight of river hurls its roar higher than a rainbow.


Aniwaniwa

Trembling across sky's cream-dress train appears the arc of rainbow's membrane,
sun's burst-through flame kindles colour from overcast;
a hawk shifts back to the river,
where a hillside has slid down a gorge as the river scrubs round it with a surge,
in mocking glub-glub cataract past a wet-gold bloom of gorse and broom,
half-echoed by bellbird's syrupy call,
beyond clumped kidney ferns, slick in iridescence from the late squall;
while on dark earth's mudcake,
toy-like, a yellow bulldozer squats,
by rimu pit-sawn weatherboards stacked inside a tin shed camouflaged with rust;
the greasy teeth of a chainsaw also there, trickled with orange sawdust,
and all around a panorama of muscular, jostling hills,
under the authority of upthrust crags,
draped with pine forest as the switchback road twitches on hairpins for a timber treatment plant;
and the flare of the sun is on the river slanted in its chasm,
as if probing for incandescence,
as flow half back-turns, then forward gleams,
ripples like numerals of surplus rolling coastwards and is squizzed at by satellite lenses,
a rivering witness-ribbon of currency,
rubbing elbows with pulp and paper,
toothpicks and matchwood;
so night engulfs each good pozzie,
beneath pinched heaven's pot of gold,
and bird chorus extinguished.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Conch Trumpet"
by .
Copyright © 2015 David Eggleton.
Excerpted by permission of Otago University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Shore

The Conch Trumpet 11

Ode to the Beach-Wrecked Petrel 12

Whakapapa of Rangi the Melody-Maker 13

Sunday's Song 14

Trails above Cook Strait 15

Raukura 16

The Hook of Maui 17

Hei-tiki 18

Lighting Up in a Singer Vogue 19

Trampers in Westland 20

Fiord Haka 22

Moriori Dendroglyphs 23

Inland

Syzygy 27

Roadkill 29

Bounty 30

Hawk and Butterfly 31

Minute Bodies Falling 32

Summer Rain 34

Hydrangeas 35

On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain 36

Catchment 37

Aniwaniwa 38

Hokitika 40

Nor'wester Flying 41

Observatory 42

River 43

Waitaha

Alpenglow Reddening 47

Orogenesis 48

Cloud-Piercer 49

Wilderness 51

Place and Mana 52

Omarama: Place of Moonlight 53

The Granary 54

The Burnt Text of Banks Peninsula 56

Off The Sheep's Back 57

Rakaia 59

Haast Amongst the Moa 60

Resurrection of the Waimakariri Floodplain 61

Mystic Courses of Camper Vans 63

Old Man Nor'wester 65

The Motherlode 66

Q Feb 22 68

Grounded 69

Erewhon Unearthed

Untold 73

The Visitation 74

Rust Casting an Iron Spell 75

Clocks, Calendars, Nights, Days 76

Atua of Nowhere Zen 77

Colonial Pidgin 79

Erewhon Unearthed 80

Sound and Fury 82

Oamaru Cavalcade 83

Provincial Champions 85

Watching the Detectives 86

Before Compulsory Drug-testing Begins 87

Beacon 88

The Opening of Toi o Tamaki Refurbished, Rugby World Cup, September 2011 89

Between Two Harbours 90

Fire

Night Flight to San Francisco 94

Six Days as a Manhattan Island Castaway 96

Ode to Coffee 98

Testament of Databody Dave 100

New Zild Book Awards Considered as a Five-Horse Race 103

The Wisdom of Crowds 104

Browser 105

Is This You? 106

Freedom Songs of the Vietcong 107

Exquisite Corpse 108

Nightshades 111

Superyacht 112

Threads 114

The Death of Gaddafi 115

Your Call May Be Recorded 118

The Age of Terror 119

Where Gods Live 121

Notes 124