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Autumn Waiata

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

ISBN: 978-0-473-17240-4

Softcover chapbook, 24pp

Autumn Waiata is a chapbook of 16 poems. There are ten related elegies, set mostly on the University of Canterbury campus, that meditate on time and place, losses and beauty. The other poems include one dedicated to Bill Pearson when the author was interviewing him in 2001; another talking back to Elsdon Best; a farewell to Hone Tuwhare; and a Coast poem, set among the dredge tailings at Ngahere, waiting for the next big flood.

                     Dropping down Otira Gorge, rain is my

                      powhiri: at one-in-sixteen grade, this

                        viaduct’s a plunge of faith.

                           (Autumn Waiata :  5. “Plunging”)

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman was born in London and grew up on the West Coast of New Zealand. His books include As Big as a Father (Steele Roberts 2002), The late great Blackball bridge sonnets (Steele Roberts 2004);

a recent work of history, Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin 2010); Shaken Down 6.3 (Canterbury University Press, 2012) and The Lost Pilot (Penguin, 2013). Holman was the 2011 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waikato; in autumn 2012, he was the New Zealand representative at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program He lives in Christchurch.