Blood Ties
\nNew and Selected Poems : 1963- 2016
\nby Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
\nCanterbuy University Press.
\n167pp. RRP $ 25.
\nISBN 978-1-927145-88-3<\/p>\n
Dylan Junkie
\nby Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
\nMakaro Press Hoopla Series
\n54 pp. RRP $ 25.
\nISBN 978-0-9941378-0-7<\/p>\n
It is a harsh fact that we live in a world where there is far more published poetry than people willing or able to read it. Over the past fifty years poetry has ceased to be a common currency. It is less often a core component of literary studies in either high school or university curricula. For most people, poetry has become esoteric and increasingly formidable. Few nowadays have ever read more than a handful of poems, let alone committed lines to memory.<\/p>\n
There are many reasons for this. A significant one is that since the 1960s some of the best poetry has gone to live in Leonard Cohen\u2019s Tower of Song; the canon is now plugged into the body electric. Of course, lyrics still matter for people, but only when encased in melody and beats.<\/p>\n
So, whenever a volume of poetry appears that is able to capture readers on first glance and then reel them in slowly for deeper, sustained pleasures, we are reminded that all is not yet lost. For me, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman\u2019s collection Blood Ties : New and Selected Poems<\/em> 1963 -2016<\/em> has this effect. These poems have a sturdy, well-weighted directness, an artful verve that welcomes the reader without easy blandishments or hyper-slam theatrics. The poems span a more than fifty year period but the great majority have been gathered from five volumes published since 2000.<\/p>\n There is an impressive range of themes and subjects – unsurprising, given the variety of life experiences which Holman, born in London and resident in New Zealand since the age of three, has had. The cover notes list a range of occupations: \u2018shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller.\u2019 He is also a distinguished historian and scholar in Maori Studies. He spent his early years in the coal-mining town of Blackball on the West Coast. He comes from the working world, and his poems affirm a sense of social justice and remembered hardship. He has a CV which echoes Walt Whitman, or the Beats, or Kiwi poets (Baxter the postman !) from a generation earlier.<\/p>\n Blood Ties <\/em>comprises eight sections but three in particular form the core of the book. \u201cSome Ancestors\u201d includes a grouping of elegies about blood ties, the consanguine links of parents, now departed. \u201cI lost him the first time I lost him a second time His courageous mother is remembered with a child\u2019s fondness in But there are also other ties that bind. Holman pays tribute to a literary father figure: Peter Hooper, his English teacher in 1963, to whom he dedicates the schoolboy poem, \u201cMoon\u201d which opens the collection. Hooper, himself a prominent writer and fabled owner of Walden Books in Greymouth, is a valued mentor (as he was to Brian Turner and Pat White). Hooper appears elsewhere in \u201cPoem for John Pule the last days of Peter Hooper\u201d as a kind of Kerouac zen mystic, in the turbulent \u201cRe-reading you\u201d and, as a digression, in the salute to Tuwhare – \u201cUniversal Hone\u201d.<\/p>\n Growing up in Blackball, his father a miner in a tight-knit community, has imbued Holman with a workerist commitment that is deeply felt. In the section entitled \u201cOld King Coal\u201d, the selections from the 2004 volume, The Late<\/em> Great Blackball Bridge Sonnets<\/em> stand out, even in this high-calibre collection. Describing the now-dismantled bridge, Holman remembers it as both vital link for coal and supplies and to the larger world: Elsewhere, he writes ruefully – \u201cNow you\u2019re obsolete planking, marking\/the route to my old town\u2019s grave: but when coal\/was still some kind of king, you were\/The royal road to heaven for kids like me.\u201d (\u201csonnet (ii)\u201d, p.67).<\/p>\n In describing the community of miners, \u201csonnet (xxxi)\u201d has echoes of D.H. Lawrence : \u201cThe bathhouse was a cathedral of nudes.\/ Here the grateful shoulders lathered, work\/forgotten in prayers of steam.\u201d (p.75)<\/p>\n In \u201cMine\u201d, he connects to the Pike River disaster of 2010. It is a powerful elegy, simply spoken and quietly pitched, gathering feeling with rhythm and repetition:<\/p>\n \u201cSon, there was a time when you were mine. In part four, \u201cTraumata Dreaming\u201d Holman\u2019s themes shift from the particular in \u201cThe boy\u201d, dreading the return home of his drunken, violent father, to poems in response to the Christchurch earthquakes \u2013 \u201cWho of you\u201d (\u201cWho of you\/ will not now bow\/pay homage to\/ Unbrick and Unstone ?\u201d) (p.95), the chant-like \u201cAfter the tremor\u201d and the chaotic, scattered syntax of \u201cwhen all you\u201d(p.99).<\/p>\n \u201cOther tongues\u201d incorporates te reo Maori sections in poems such as \u201cDreaming of Te Rauparaha\u201d and \u201cE korero ana ki Nga Tama Toa\/ Talking to the young warriors\u201d (p.133) And, not forgetting another inspiration, his kiwi Chapman\u2019s Homer, he describes \u201cOn looking again into Heemi\u2019s Collected Poems\u201d (p.137)<\/p>\n Blood Ties<\/em> is a richly rewarding collection in its range, its assured (and reassuring) voice and the deft vividness of its language. It is fine poetry in anyone\u2019s reckoning.<\/p>\n Bob Dylan\u2019s songs have been internationally ubiquitous for more than fifty years and his recent Nobel Prize for Literature highlights his place in world letters. Many poets have been ardent admirers \u2013Robert Adamson in Australia, the Canadian poet Stephen Scobie has constructed intricate acrostic poems to honour his Bobness \u2013 so Jeffrey Paparoa Holman\u2019s slim tribute, the bluntly titled, Dylan Junkie,<\/em> is yet another genuflection to the enigmatic, elusive master.<\/p>\n Dedicated to radio 2ZB host Pete Sinclair, on whose Sunset Show in 1965, Holman first heard \u201cSubterranean Homesick Blues\u201d, Holman\u2019s poems are a mix of tangential meditations on what Dylan himself called his \u201cthin wild mercury music\u201d. \u201cHearing him was wind over water\u201d Holman exults \u2013 \u201csixty can\u2019t call back sixteen\/ expectation is a mountain\/ fulfilment a sparrow\/ what he set free was light as a feather \/left you hopping for joy over crumbs.\u201d (p.10)<\/p>\n Holman is writing a panegyric to a poet who released in his New Zealand teenage self a sense of the glory and weirdness of language that has clearly sustained him through his whole life. In the 1960s Dylan\u2019s alchemical wizardry was unique. Allen Ginsberg could see that, as could the Beatles. No-one staked out more new territory than Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n So, whether it was through the air waves of the 2ZB Sunset Show or, in my case, also in 1965, from my bedroom in Palmerston North, accidentally picking up the first broadcast of \u201cLike a Rolling Stone\u201don Sydney\u2019s radio 2UE – followers everywhere believed they were tuning in to the future itself.<\/p>\n Many of Holman\u2019s poems use Dylan\u2019s song titles: \u201cWent to see the gypsy\u201d, \u201dI believe in you\u201d, \u201cWedding song\u201d. Occasionally they are overwrought like \u201cA simple twist of fate\u201d; others directly refer to specific Dylanology such as Bob\u2019s Wildean swagger through Camden Town in his video clip for \u201cWorld Gone Wrong\u201d, or the eye-watering astonishment when the unreleased masterpiece \u201cBlind Willie McTell\u201d was finally, casually, loosed upon the world. An outstanding poem is \u201cNo time to think\u201c- a recollection of an act of instinctive heroism Holman poignantly recalls from the West Coast in 1978.<\/p>\n The centrepiece in this collection of meditations, perorations and un-tranquil recollections is the sequence, \u201cLines from Hard Rain\u201d. Using phrases from \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall\u201d, Dylan\u2019s apocalyptic hymn from 1963 – part Book of Revelation, part Child Ballad, part sci-fi dystopia – Holman threads reveries of possum traps and marram grass, Bottle Lake and Blackball Creek. The poem sequence is a daisy chain of phrases quoted from \u201cHard Rain\u201d – mouth of a graveyard, baby with wolves, diamonds with nobody, black branch drips blood, tongues all broken.<\/p>\n These fragments Holman has shored against, not just his ruins, but his ecstacy. Dylan Junkie<\/em> is an obsessive project and a celebration. These are annotations from a pilgrimage \u2013 including an actual one, described in \u201cHeading for Hibbing\u201d, notes and epiphanies from Holman\u2019s road trip to Dylan\u2019s birthplace in Minnesota.<\/p>\n There are undoubtedly excellent stand-alone poems here, but Dylan Junkie<\/em> is also inextricably connected to its host texts. It is hooked on Bob, you might say. And there are plenty of us out there who share this dependency. There is always the risk that these intriguing, evocative poems are for Dylan devotees and trainspotters only. Knowing the scriptures certainly helps. But then again, as someone once said: you don\u2019t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.<\/p>\n Murray Bramwell lives in Adelaide and is a regular theatre reviewer for The Australian<\/em>. Blood Ties New and Selected Poems : 1963- 2016 by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman Canterbuy University Press. 167pp. RRP $ 25. ISBN 978-1-927145-88-3 Dylan Junkie by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman Makaro Press Hoopla Series 54 pp. RRP $ 25. ISBN 978-0-9941378-0-7 It is a harsh fact that we live in a world where there is far more published poetry than people willing or able to read it. Over the past fifty years poetry has ceased to be a common currency. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,5,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-37","category-archive","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2814,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions\/2814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn \u201cFather and son\u201d he writes : \u201cI do not want another father: old man now\/dead, cancer faded\/and swelled you\u201d (p.33) This is the negligent, cruel, war-damaged father he describes elsewhere in \u201cAs Big as a father \u201c the title poem of Holman\u2019s collection published in 2002 and winner of the Whitireia Prize
\nthe following year. It is a splendid poem and has a strong ballad rhythm which shrewdly stays just short of declamation :<\/p>\n
\nBefore I could grasp
\nWho he was\u2026<\/p>\n
\nTo the rum-running Navy
\nWho took him and took him\u2026
\nI lost him a third time
\nTo a ship in a bottle
\nThat rocked him and rocked him
\nAnd shook out his pockets\u2026 (p.37)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe\u2019ll meet\u201c and \u201cMary at dawn, 25 April 2004\u201d : \u201c Now Mum is gone, who\u2019s left ? Memory once\/was a blazing day and now it bites the eyes\u2026\u201d(p.39).<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAnd over you would come the town\u2019s lifeblood:\/groceries and detonators, the miners\u2019 wages and\/ the morning paper , The Grey<\/em> River Argus<\/em> (\u2018New Zealand\u2019s \u2018Pioneer Labour Daily\u2019) and for some\/that National rag, the Evening Star<\/em> (\u201csonnet(vi)\u201d p.69.<\/p>\n
\nBrother, when the shining day was ours.
\nFriend, there was an hour when all went well\u2026
\n\u2026And now, the mountain says, \u2018He\u2019s mine.\u2019
\nAnd now, the rivers say, \u2018He\u2019s ours.\u2019
\nAnd now, the darkness says, \u2018My friend.\u2019 \u2026 \u201c(p.81)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cJewels and Binoculars\u201d, New Zealand Books\/ Pukapapa<\/em> Aotearoa<\/em>, Vol.27, No.4, Issue 120, Summer 2017, pp.23-4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"