Blood Ties

About this book

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. Confronting the ghosts of bereavement and loss, in this gripping and powerful collection Holman leads us from remembrance and elegy, in all their guises, to a kind of 'spring of the soul'. Poetry and song have their own healing gifts: here, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman calls on their potency to set the mind free.