Author(s): Rob Jackaman

Poetry

Apes Road is a small dirt track off the coastal route to Dunedin above Karitane. It is also the name of Rob Jackaman?s thirteenth collection of poems, in many ways a companion and sequel to his Late Love Songs, offering us more songs, more love, more startling images of human nature. In this volume, though, the canvas seems bigger than ever, as the poems oscillate between here and there, then and now, telescoping conventional notions of space and time so they all become simultaneous. Jackaman gains a fresh perspective on the themes that have haunted his work almost from the outset: the way memory provides a vivid yet ambigious construction of ourselves; the way we cope with love and loss; and the way we seek to give ourselves a sense of direction when circumstances have disorientated us both geographically and psychologically. All of these afford us a fascinating glimpse of what it?s like to be ?up on Apes Road?.