‘A net of words across the Pacific … The Bond of Time is a vast, surreal cornucopia of images stretching over 88 pages, a non-lineal narrative bursting at its seams into every successive five-lined unrhymed stanza, each self-contained but caught in the net of Pule’s ravishing imagination. [] It seems obvious that while a human relationship is signaled from the very beginning and pursued through dark and light along the poem’s entire trajectory, no one person could be the sole object of the poet’s attention and passion
this is a love letter to a sea of islands, to Niue and the entire Pacific.’ From the Introduction by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. The Bond of Time was privately published in New Zealand in 1985 in a limited edition, and a second edition was published in 1998 by the Pacific Writing Forum at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. This new edition includes an Introduction by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, and the striking cover design features John Pule’s painting The Great World (to Ha). John Puhiatau Pule is a novelist, poet and artist. Pule was born in Liku, Niue, and has lived in New Zealand since 1964. He was awarded the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate in 2004 and was co-recipient of the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury in 2013.