Blood Ties

Woven from the sharp and tensile strands of memory, many of the poems in this collection return to the primal pains of neglect and damage in childhood. Emotional memory is anchored in the specific detail of an era – the selection is laced with dreams of flight and memories of West Coast town rituals, places and people – and fans out to draw on local and international history, exploring with wit, anger, imagination and grief the ways in which Aotearoa still carries the wounds of colonization and class.

“Blood Ties is a journey through a lifetime that is a parable of settlement, one man’s response to the challenge of living responsibly and with sensitivity to the question of where we are and what we must be. There are strong ancestors throughout, but, at the same time and very distinctively, the urgent sound of this river of poetry is all this fine poet’s own.” —Patrick Evans

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, poet, memoirist and historian grew up in Blackball on the West Coast and now lives in Christchurch. Having worked as a shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller, he is presently a senior adjunct fellow in the University of Canterbury School of Humanities and Creative Arts. His collections of poetry include As Big as a Father (Steele Roberts, 2002), long-listed for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2003.