The Empty Grandstand, 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.