Atonement by Vaughan Rapatahana

Vaughan Rapatahana’s poems are pan-Pacific argosies, taking us from the green hills of Aotearoa to the crowded alleys of Hong Kong and beyond. Exploring identity politics, they crisscross global intersections of commerce, history, and culture, and at the center is the poet and his personal history.

His poems—experimentations of various verse forms—are radical, dissenting, freewheeling, and restless. They glitter with sharp insights and wry reflections as they trace narrative arcs that run between years of adolescent idealism and post-Sixties rites of passage. The works also guide readers through Rapatahana’s more recent memories and evocations of family, friends, and fellow-travellers. He writes of alienation and deracination, of today’s complicated multicultural realities, and then returns to his ancestral roots in Maoritanga, before veering off yet again.

These are poems freighted with combustible emotions, mingling angst and comedy, and skepticism in fiery and haunting combinations. Sometimes dreamlike or riddling, sometimes elegiac, sometimes deliberately linguistically unstable, Vaughan Rapatahana’s poems decipher significant patterns out of the randomness of life’s events and give succinct and effective voice to the peculiarly modern condition of the global nomad—at once home everywhere and home nowhere.

David Eggleton
Editor, Landfall Journal