Time of the Icebergs: Poems: Poems by David Eggleton - Softcover

Eggleton, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1877578029 ISBN 13: 9781877578021

Publisher: Otago University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Time of the Icebergs is a collection of poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present "hurtling globalization's highway" where "Google tells Google that Google saves." As poet David Eggleton 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." 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, ghettoized gods, and "Vern Acular, that good keen bloke" all make an appearance. 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 one could "follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut by the soaraway kite of blue sky." This is no mere intellectual exercise, as through it all thrums the steady beat of life.

About this title

Product Description:

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.'

About the Author:

David Eggleton is a performance poet and writer who grew up between Fiji and New Zealand. Eggleton's many awards include six times Book Reviewer of the Year in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, PEN Best First Book of Poetry in 1987, the Robert Burns Fellowship and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, he was London Time Out's Street Entertainer of the Year in 1985. He has also written or contributed to many books on the arts in New Zealand, and has produced several documentaries, CDs and short films.

About this edition

• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1877578029
• ISBN 13: 9781877578021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88