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.