The conch trumpet -- Ode to the beach-wrecked petrel -- Whakapapa of Rangi the Melody-maker -- Sunday's song -- Trails above Cook Strait -- Raukura -- The hook of Maui -- Hei-tiki -- Lighting up in a singer vogue -- Trampers in Westland -- Fiord haka -- Moriori dendroglyphs -- Syzygy -- Roadkill -- Bounty -- Hawk and butterfly -- Minute bodies falling -- Summer rain -- Hydrangeas -- On recrudescence of waterfalls after all night rain -- Catchment -- Aniwaniwa -- Hokitika -- Nor'wester flying -- Observatory -- River -- Alpenglow reddening -- Orogenesis -- Cloud-piercer -- Wilderness -- Place and mana -- Omarama: place of moonlight -- The granary -- The burnt text of Banks Peninsula -- Off the sheep's back -- Rakaia -- Haast among the moa -- Resurrection of the Waimakariri floodplain -- Mystic courses of camper vans -- Old Man Nor'wester -- The motherlode -- Q Feb 22 -- Grounded -- Untold -- The visitation -- Rust casting an iron spell -- Clocks, calendars, nights, days -- Atua of nowhere zen -- Colonial pidgin -- Erewhon unearthed -- Sound and fury -- Oamaru cavalcade -- Provincial champions -- Watching the detectives -- Before compulsory drug-testing begins -- Beacon -- The opening of Toi o Tāmaki refurbished, Rugby World Cup, September 2011 -- Between two harbours -- Night flight to San Francisco -- Six days as a Manhattan Island castaway -- Ode to coffee -- Testament of Databody Dave -- New Zild book awards considered as a five-horse race -- The wisdom of crowds -- Browser -- Is this you? -- Freedom songs of the Vietcong -- Exquisite corpse -- Night shades -- Superyacht -- Threads -- The death of Gaddafi -- Your call may be recorded -- The age of terror -- Where gods live.

"The Conch Shell calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen closely, 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 ... 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"--Back cover.