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Otherwise
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.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 16, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 23, 2026
I come across John Dennison's name here and there, haven't met him yet, but I thought I'd check out his poetry, and handily discovered his prize-nominated book as an ebook at the library. I checked it out.
It's probably a cliche to say poetry is evocative - poetry should be - and Dennison's really is. I repeatedly saw place, context and image emerge as I read his lines. He also has a lovely word hoard (as they say) ‐ his choice of individual words and the way he employs them.
Also his subtle evocations and evidences of the Other (Otherwise), the outside, a word emerging, radiating, or movement of spirit sparking movement, rather than explicitly stated, in the spaces. The Crookes radiometer pictured on the cover gives us a metaphor for this.
The poems have a lovely brevity to them. I declare verbose poems out. The world is too full of words anyway - short poems are vital. I desire them. And...
I was thinking (it came to me yesterday morning) that if Silence is the ground of all speaking (and maybe all being) ("the great quiet that is the source and origin of all utterance", as Marilyn McEntyre puts it in her book When Poets Pray), then you better honour it, be brief, have your words well-formed and meaningful. Don't clutter it.
Good stuff, well wrought.
It's probably a cliche to say poetry is evocative - poetry should be - and Dennison's really is. I repeatedly saw place, context and image emerge as I read his lines. He also has a lovely word hoard (as they say) ‐ his choice of individual words and the way he employs them.
Also his subtle evocations and evidences of the Other (Otherwise), the outside, a word emerging, radiating, or movement of spirit sparking movement, rather than explicitly stated, in the spaces. The Crookes radiometer pictured on the cover gives us a metaphor for this.
The poems have a lovely brevity to them. I declare verbose poems out. The world is too full of words anyway - short poems are vital. I desire them. And...
I was thinking (it came to me yesterday morning) that if Silence is the ground of all speaking (and maybe all being) ("the great quiet that is the source and origin of all utterance", as Marilyn McEntyre puts it in her book When Poets Pray), then you better honour it, be brief, have your words well-formed and meaningful. Don't clutter it.
Good stuff, well wrought.
February 16, 2016
Sure, this is spiritual, but it also comes across as unctuous.
Really disliked the way he writes about women.
Really disliked the way he writes about women.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews