The Empty Grandstand

<h2><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></h2><p><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely testing his identity against difference - places people politics and importantly language.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p><br></p>