A Way of Seeing: Perception, Imagination, and Poetry

by John Allison

We usually think of imagination as a fanciful, whimsical faculty that has little to do with reality and truth. This beautifully written book by the Australian poet John Allison shows how ordinary imagination can be intensified to become an organ of cognition―a path of development to real knowing. Allison shows how poetry―poetic knowing and seeing―can reveal aspects of the world invisible to science. Three lucid chapters describe the path to true imagination, where attention is the key. First we must practice it, then we must become aware of the processes involved in it. Learning to experience “poise,” we must come to terms with the shadow―or all that says “No” in us. The combination of attention, equanimity, and assent opens the world in a new way. Allison then examines how poets have actually developed and practiced the kind of “deep seeing” that “image work” involves. For this he draws on William Shakespeare, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Octavio Paz. The author concludes with a sequence of his own poems that exemplify the philosophy and practice he has developed.

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

John Allison is a poet and management consultant.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.