Fast Talker

Description

A new collection of poetry by a self-confessed 'ranter', Fast Talker is energetic, contemporary, and filled with an emphatic, punchy political and social awareness. Some of the poems are indeed Eggleton's well-known 'rants' - part showman patter, part incantation, part prophetic diatribe - that range helter skelter over the Kiwi psyche, the South Pacific, the media, the suburbs of Auckland, big business and the worlds of war and commodity. Fast Talker is, however, more varied in tone than Eggleton's previous books and traverses a wider landscape than his usual stomping ground. Other poems, more gentle in tone, observe contemporary life in his distinctive, vivid style, building their dense lines with forceful, cumulative images, lists and inventive language. Love poems, odes, travelogues and landscape poems offer further variety in this energetic collection which constantly shifts in tone and rhythm.

David Eggleton is the author of more than 20 books, including "Empty Orchestra, Here on Earth, People of the Land, Rhyming Planet, South Pacific Sunrise," and "Ready to Fly," which was a Montana Book Award finalist. He is a winner of the British Street Entertainer of the Year and New Zealand Book Reviewer of the Year Awards and a former Burns Fellow at Otago University.

'The layers in "Fast Talker" are insightful and satisfying, and it is easy to see why Eggleton is a popular poet." "Counterpoise""