Otherwise

by John Dennison

John Dennison’s first collection, Otherwise, is a finely crafted marvel. The poems here are concerned, above all, with love, and with the strange, unlooked-for manner of its appearances among us. Marked by an emotional acuity and formal deftness, the lyricism of Otherwise draws us into confrontations with human equivocacy and finitude. A trio of elegies for poet Seamus Heaney is moving; a heart-shaking sequence recounts an encounter in Calcutta. Ranging globally from Scotland to Dunedin, Otherwise also sits firmly in the New Zealand literary tradition, with poems take in that Baxter’s bees, Bethell gardening, Duggan’s amends and Curnow’s ‘surge-black fissure’. And here too, because ‘some things bear repeating’, are singular moments of turning, of grace and our refusals. This is a moving, meditative and vulnerable manifesto from an assured new voice.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 16, 2015

Reviews

[Belinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sure, this is spiritual, but it also comes across as unctuous.
Really disliked the way he writes about women.