Vaughan Rapatahana

Home, Away, Elsewhere Vaughan Rapatahana

A poetry collection in three parts. Home is events, situations, descriptions, and attitudes about Hong Kong, which is now Vaughan's home. Away contains poems about events, situations, descriptions, and attitudes about Aotearoa (New Zealand), in particular from a Maori (marginalised) perspective and also about all the other places where Vaughan has lived - The Republic of Nauru, Brunei Darussalam, The People's Republic of China, Australia, The United Arab Emirates (UAE), The Philippines. Elsewhere is emotions (the entire gamut), relationships (marriages, family, friends), deaths (parents, children), reflections - some wry, etcetera - not specifically tied to physical locations. Vaughan does not write to any set forms/formats but attempts to utilise type-face/shape/what a poem looks like on a page to reflect what he attempts to say. He writes to stay sane. "These poems express what I am, and what I also think people I see are, within. They are not mere academic or literary exercises. They are lived experiences, I guess.""Poems with attitude. ... passionate, uncompromising and sardonic. ...there is darkness here ... also wit in abundance and a playfulness in language and thought ... at times laugh-out-loud funny.... a compelling voice and Vaughan uses it skilfully to tell us his stories, make his often pungent points, and take us places few of us have seen." - James Norcliffe, Robert Burns Fellow (2000), Aotearoa-New Zealand."These poems are pieces of an intricately interlinked multi-cultural and multi-lingual world, in which the poet must learn to live. In fact the poet relishes this confusing richness. His verses celebrate the graphic possibility of words, their visual appearance and sounds. So one must come to them with big eyes, big ears and a limitless imagination." - Muhammad Haji Salleh, National Laureate, Malaysia."Vaughan Rapatahana's poems are the testament of a post-colonial wanderer. An exploration of identity politics, they move between the bicultural and bilingual context of Aotearoa New Zealand and the extraterritorial context of globalisation. They criss-cross intersections of commerce, history and culture .... poems freighted with combustible emotions.... Sometimes dreamlike or riddling, sometimes elegiac, sometimes deliberately linguistically unstable, Vaughan Rapataha's poems make 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 of Landfall, Aotearoa-New Zealand."His uses of typography are so simple, so obvious once seen, and so very clever - 'the FAT bastard' - that my admiration increased with every page I turned." -UK-based journal, "The Journal"