After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad
Author(s): Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
The first, 'Pākehā Mōteatea & Southern Shanties', is a poetic evocation of forgotten South Island histories, from all points of the compass, especially those remote and rural backwaters that have long since slipped below the radar of much contemporary urban, identity focussed literary practices.
You are more likely to meet miners, shearers, rugby league forwards and fishers, than a digital native surfing cyberspace in search of the next blizzard of pixels. Mythic figures emerge: there are no confessions, no internal monologues; rather, a cast of characters Chaucer would certainly recognise — the local cop, the publican’s wife, the deckhand stinking of fish, asleep in a homeward bound fishing boat. Each poem in five or six blank verse stanzas attempts to capture a moment, life in a vanished culture, an earthquake, a flood, all in the beating heart of the past.
Profit hungry property developers get a serve; the ghettoising of his own generation in retirement compounds comes in for questioning, accelerating the loss of rich family histories as the generations are prised apart. These accounts he was able to absorb, as his feisty grandmother late in her eighties, living with them, regaled him with incredible family legends, of great liners sinking, of bombs raining down.
Reviews for Jeffrey’s work:
As Big As A Father (2002) - Mark Murphy in the Christchurch Press, noted that ‘the poetic “me” is one of contrasts. From hard, wounded men ... to a softened, bicultural masculinity... [in this] Holman bends the New Zealand tradition in new and interesting ways.’
In the Listener Peter Bland wrote, ‘there is a touch of the Steinbecks (anger, loss, moral outrage) drifting through the beerhalls and paddocks', and at the same time the collection manages a ‘nice balancing of humour and serious language games.'
Professor Patrick Evans commented on “A strong, clear, highly individualistic voice that has nevertheless come right out of our great tradition”.
The Late Great Blackball Bride Sonnets (2004) David Eggleton commented in The Listener: 'Holman affirms the working-class spirit ... his poems are vivid with imagery. This is poetry as local history and vice-versa: "In the house of my body (he writes), I carry that river."
Shaken Down 6.3. Poems from the second Christchurch earthquake, 22 February 2011- (2012) Hamesh Wyatt, in the Otago Daily Times wrote, 'Holman speaks the truth with a raw, sometimes harrowing clarity.'
Blood Ties (2017) Murray Bramwell in New Zealand Books commented "Blood Ties 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's reckoning".
Patrick Evans wrote of Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems 1963-2016, “This selection of poems is a journey through a lifetime that is a parable of settlement, one man’s response to the challenge of living responsibly with sensitivity to the question of where we are and what we must be”.
AUTHOR BIO: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and non-fiction writer. His work has been widely published and anthologised. Holman was born in London and emigrated to New Zealand in 1950. He has worked as a shearer, postman, social worker and bookseller. Holman completed his PhD on the writings of the 19th century ethnographer Elsdon Best in 2007, and has lectured in the English programme at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. He has tutored at the Hagley Community College’s Writers’ Institute; latterly, a prison visitor with Bernadette Hall and Jeni Curtis, Christchurch poets who ran a weekly reading group for prisoners, He Kōrero Pukapuka at Paparua Prison.
Jeffrey’s poetry publications include his first collection, Strange Children, in Two Poets (1974) with David Walker; Flood Damage (1998), and As Big as a Father (2002). The title poem 'As big as a father' won the 1997 Whitirea Prize and is included in Essential New Zealand Poems (2001). His poems and short stories have also appeared in the NZ Listener and Landfall and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, including Big Sky (2002), Land Very Fertile (2008). His work has featured on The Spinoff's Friday Poem and the Phantom Billstickers Poetry poster series.
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