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The Empty Grandstand
The wild secrets of boyhood is where Lloyd Jones sets off in his first book of poetry; intoxicated with images, and invoking dream spaces where language is forever in play.
Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered – a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world.
The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice.
Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood – riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped.
As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference – places, people, politics and importantly, language.
The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned – it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery. Dream spaces where language is forever in play.
Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered – a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world.
The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice.
Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood – riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped.
As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference – places, people, politics and importantly, language.
The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned – it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery. Dream spaces where language is forever in play.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 3, 2024
1 person is currently reading
3 people want to read
About the author
Lloyd Jones
107 books149 followersLloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, a place which has become a frequent setting and subject for his subsequent works of fiction. He studied at Victoria University, and has worked as a journalist and consultant as well as a writer. His recent novels are: Biografi (1993); Choo Woo (1998); Here At The End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002); Paint Your Wife (2004);and Mister Pip (2007). He is also the author of a collection of short stories, Swimming to Australia (1991).
In 2003, he published a children's picture book, Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer, and this was followed by Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot (2004), a book for 9-14 year olds. He compiled Into the Field of Play: New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport (1992), and also wrote Last Saturday (1994), the book of an exhibition about New Zealand Saturdays, with photographs by Bruce Foster. The Book of Fame (2000), is his semi-fictional account of the 1905 All-Black tour, and was adapted for the stage by Carol Nixon in 2003.
Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize for his novel, Mister Pip (2007), set in Bougainville in the South Pacific, during the 1990s. He was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the same year he undertook a Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
In 2003, he published a children's picture book, Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer, and this was followed by Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot (2004), a book for 9-14 year olds. He compiled Into the Field of Play: New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport (1992), and also wrote Last Saturday (1994), the book of an exhibition about New Zealand Saturdays, with photographs by Bruce Foster. The Book of Fame (2000), is his semi-fictional account of the 1905 All-Black tour, and was adapted for the stage by Carol Nixon in 2003.
Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize for his novel, Mister Pip (2007), set in Bougainville in the South Pacific, during the 1990s. He was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the same year he undertook a Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
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January 5, 2025I listened to the audio book (read by the author).
Decided not to give this one a star rating, as it's hard to make sense of poetry without seeing the enjambment and stanza choices.
Decided not to give this one a star rating, as it's hard to make sense of poetry without seeing the enjambment and stanza choices.
Displaying 1 of 1 review