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 colonisation 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. ‘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 Blood Ties has been designed and printed in collaboration with Ilam Press.