Dracula falls on his feet in Aotearoa, on a stolen estate between braided river and the Main Divide. Sophisticated and devious, he ends up at the centre of power trying to influence the future of a nation. Tim Jones arrives here by ship from Lincolnshire
to find a place of treacherous coastlines, mountain passes and cold southern air. Like Dracula he goes north to Wellington.
There are other characters jostling in Tim’s poems: a mother who is subjected to electric-shock therapy, the knight of lost causes, an angel who invests in a startup, a rapid hedgehog. And all the while the waves come closer. Dracula in the Colonies is Tim Jones at his most serious and his most playful, ‘his feet leaving marks on the path to the page’.
Published by The Cuba Press
ISBN: 978-1-98-859596-2
“Tim Jones’ powerful new collection takes us from Grimsby to Antarctica, traversing family life, migration, politics, climate change and loss. This is honest, tender, funny and intelligent writing from a story-teller poet.”
– Janis Freegard
“Tim Jones’s latest collection is, as you’d expect, eminently readable but never comfortable. It contains multitudes. There is a vulnerable mini-autobiography in verse, and tender elegies about what happens at the moment of death and the beginning of grief. There are also broadsides about the grotesque interplay of politics, media, and climate inaction, among other civilisational lapses, and, as this book’s title suggests, there are poems that examine the extractive, blood-sucking nature of the colonial project. Dracula in the Colonies is full of characters you’ll love to hate from a poet whose work we know to love.”
– Erik Kennedy