Dylan Junkie: 2017

Description

From the moment in mid-1965 when the urgent, cheeky, street smart rap of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' burst out of the family radio, Bob Dylan's voice has been embedded in the soundtrack of Jeffrey Paparoa Holman's life. Through thick and thin, elation and desolation, he has followed the American Shakespeare/Jewish minstrel as far as Dylan's old Iron Range home, a thousand-mile pilgrimage from Iowa City to Hibbing, Minnesota. The poems of Dylan Junkie grasp at the Robert Zimmerman that changed us, enraged us, blessed and mystified us right until the moment when he was awarded, and grudgingly accepted, the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. A collection that growls with a familiar voice while singing with its own.

Brought up on naval bases and in West Coast mining towns, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman has worked as a sheep shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller. He is now a senior adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury and works there as a lifelong learning co-ordinator. Jeffrey has published non-fiction and six collections of poetry, with As Big as a Father long-listed for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The title poem won the 1997 Whitireia Prize and was selected for Essential New Zealand Poems.