Dracula in the Colonies

Tim Jones

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 and knocks on the door of Parliament; in his case he’s seeking action for climate change. 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’.