Devils Trumpet - takahē

Devil’s Trumpet by Tracey Slaughter. Victoria University Press (now Te Herenga Waka Press) 2021. RRP $30.00. Pb, 72 pp. ISBN: 978177654170. Reviewed by Hester Ullyart

31 stories plunge needle deep into the private bloodstream of pain, obsession, grief, disappointment and shame that Slaughter’s characters pulse, delivered with the cool air of sinking a beer at the end of a long day, flicking ash as the revelations reel.

We’re in ‘the small town edged with the rattle of blue trucks, the 3am blue that you can’t dream in’(eleven stories you paint blue, p.79). Nameless characters drift and bark, wholly recognisable – neighbour, cousin, girl across the street. Love is sweet but it is also the poison of tropane alkaloid that causes flushed skin, convulsions, coma. Desire is an everyday hallucination, dysfunction masked in the clockwork of mundanity.

We begin in cuckold, the kind that tears a family apart

‘…the world outside of anywhere they touch is a desert. Like the agony outside a prayer.’ (stations of the end, p.16)

Slaughter’s depiction of the deep-felt tangle of saying goodbye to someone you were never supposed to have is uncanny–

‘the longing turns her heartbeat to leather, a swollen thing moving with a terrible sloth, stiffening, withered in the distant ribs, then punching a vast ache into prominence’. (p.16)

She writes people out of the page like a sorceress, brought into focus with alarming poetry, oily in its ink–

‘She still has teenage knees, but a store bought blink she aims at me limpid with liquor’ (god taught me to give up on people, p.175)

I re-read, slower, relishing the bumps, like sucking on a tooth with your tongue, marvelling the dents and details which make the white sharp enough to cut through meat.

In ‘25-13’ the mother of a game paralysed sports talent, narrates a new vocation as ‘over age bogus cheerleader’ at his hospital bed. We traipse the testosterone fuelled track of before, note the awkward care of his burly mates, the grief of this new prison, how to wear it–

‘here in the backyard I hold out the stains of him, all the rip-shit dents and scuffs- he was always going for broke at whatever activity he was attacking, full tilt, brute force, a mighty irrepressible blur.’(p.57)

Masculinity reeks and bends.

But so does the romance.

It dances in ‘holding the torch’ with the wriggle of childhood (p. 69)

‘we slept in our togs, their rockpool scent- our bodies sucked all summer on their itchy stretch’.

Time takes on a softer form, mothers shedding the brittle roles that patriarchy demands, sensuality reigning until

‘the gods came in the shape of our fathers.’(p.75)

In ‘ladybirds’, dead girls come back to life, briefly, with a blast of sun and smoke.

‘That’s what we all have to think of, I suppose…Of what we didn’t have taken, (…)
Of what we didn’t lose’. (p.129)

Slaughter finds words for the things most of us know but can’t bear to look at. An incomparable writer at the top of her game. Tough love running laughing into the fire on a bed of broken shells. Devils Trumpet is sensational.

Hester Ullyart Writer, actress, performance poet, director, song maker – Hester Ullyart is an award-winning artist hailing from the port city of Hull, England, home of fish and chips by the estuary. She lives in Te Whakaraupò Harbour where she writes, watches, and makes, whenever she can. www.hesterullyart.com