Poems give insight into earthquake experiences
Poems give insight into earthquake experiences
The earthquake experiences of an acclaimed
Christchurch writer have inspired a new collection of
poetry, published this month by Canterbury University
Press.
Shaken Down 6.3 is
the latest collection from Dr Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, who
says the poems speak to his personal experiences of the
recent earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.
“What I wanted to do was produce something from
the inside, inside me, so that it wasn’t an external view
of the destruction and the clean-up attempts but was
actually someone’s thoughts and feelings about what it was
like to be in Christchurch and Japan. My hope is that these
poems will communicate with others who have felt the same
thing and also give readers an appreciation for what it was
like to experience these events,” he says.
“In Christchurch, everyone talks about the
earthquakes – it’s like Christchurch is the scene of a
play and the script is about the earthquake. The earth has
taken us over and it felt important to record that and talk
back to it.”
The poems were written
while Dr Holman was writer in residence at the University of
Waikato in Hamilton in 2011. While the residency was for the
full year, he was in Christchurch for the 22 February 2011
earthquake and visited Japan in April after the country was
hit by the devastating magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami in
March that same year.
“There are a
couple of poems in the collection that were written in Japan
and some of the other poems contain references to the
earthquake there, so in this book the Christchurch and Japan
events are entwined. I guess I was responding to what they
were going through on a far greater scale than us and also
acknowledging the Japanese students who died in
Christchurch.”
Each poem in Shaken
Down 6.3 is matched with a photograph taken by Dr Holman
after the 22 February earthquake and includes an essay
reflecting on whether art can play a role in mitigating the
human experience of events such as natural
disasters.
Dr Holman is a senior
adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities at the University
of Canterbury. His previous poetry collections include As
Big as a Father (Steele Roberts, 2002), The late great
Blackball Bridge sonnets (Steele Roberts, 2004), Fly Boy
(Steele Roberts, 2010) and Autumn Waiata (Cold Hub Press,
2010). He has also written Best of Both Worlds (Penguin
2010), a study of the relationship between ethnographer
Elsdon Best and the Tamakaimoana chief, Tutakangahau of
Maungapōhatu. He was recently awarded Creative New
Zealand’s University of Iowa Residency for
2012.
Shaken Down 6.3 will
be launched on 28 June at the University Bookshop at the
University of Canterbury.
Shaken Down 6.3 by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman,
published by Canterbury University Press, June 2012, RRP
NZ$20, paperback, ISBN 978-1-927145-30-2
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