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Cold Hub Press ~ John Allison

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living seems more

complicated now than dying


taken off death row

and given life and then parole


some day to be

called back in to face the fact


for it’s a sentence

with a determined predicate


however I will live

as though indeed I were living


laughing it off like

anyone else with a conviction


still there are times

when it becomes quite shaky


now for instance

wanting to say the unsayable


my house of words

is creaking in the wind tonight


yet poetry is all there is

when nothing else makes sense


© John Allison 2019


Publication date: 8 July, 2019

A PLACE TO RETURN TO

John Allison

ISBN: 978-0-473-48101-8

Softcover, 120 pp, 210 x 148mm

John Allison’s new collection comprises 29 new poems along with 22 previously uncollected poems.


“The tone is elegiac and erudite, an erudition worn lightly and leavened by flashes of self-deprecating wit. ‘Attentive to the words between our words, the poems reach for the ineffable, the transcendent, seeking things of the spirit in the minutiae of closely observed landscapes––hills, sea, rocks––and they range widely across New Zealand, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Memory and the present coexist in these poems in a wistful fusion and always, turning away from darkness, they tell us ‘what it means to walk inside the light’.”  ––James Norcliffe


“Poetry, as some sort of explanation, or in lieu of any explanation; or perhaps, an attempt at saying the essentially unsayable . . . this seems to be my poetic project.” ––John Allison