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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

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