The Bond of Time: An Epic Love Poem

The Bond of Time is an epic love poem that has been described by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman as “a precocious masterpiece” and “one of the great poems of Oceania produced in the last century.” John Puhiatau Pule was just 21 years old living in Auckland when he wrote The Bond of Time: an Epic Love Poem, composed as a lyrical address by a lover to his beloved. The love that preoccupies the youthful poet in The Bond of Time is multi-faceted; it combines the erotic and surreal with the earthy and the mundane, the classical with modern. Pule says that The Bond of Time is classic Pacific poetry written in English and also about living in the Pacific and New Zealand. “It is partly a love song to Polynesia. When I wrote it I was influenced profoundly by the New Zealand landscape, by Niue, and by the Pacific Ocean, and by world literature, from the English Romantics to modern European literature. I was delving into history and spending a lot of time in museums.” Pule published it in a limited edition in 1985. A second edition was published in 1998 by the Pacific Writing Forum University of the South Pacific, Fiji, when Pule was a writer in residence, but the poem has been out of print for 16 years. Poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman has written the introduction for the new edition, and is delighted that The Bond of Time, which he describes as an “all-but-forgotten classic of Pasifika poetry in English,” will now have the opportunity to reach new hearts and minds.