Author(s): Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

NZ Poetry

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.