Notes of the empty grandstand

When I was a child, before I had been up in an aeroplane, I was taken to the upper deck of the new grandstand on the outskirts of our town. It was a near vertiginous experience. A teetering open slope exposed to the raw elements. Rain. Ferocious gales. From my seat I could see the coordinates of my young life. The harbour, the wharf, the winding backs of the valley hills. That moment, sixty years on, is re-visited in the title poem, The Empty Grandstand, but with a different view in mind. The reference points are cultural. I began to think of the grandstand as a metaphorical perch. How, from the moment we arrive in this world, we are placed in a particular way. So, naturally enough, there is another poem that describes the dismantling of the grandstand. A disavowal of much of what was handed down to me.  

I love poetry. I have loved it since I was a callow 19-year-old carrying a copy of ee cummings poems around in my back pocket. I don’t recall any of those poems. I doubt I understood them. But what entranced me then still does– the radical reinvention of the sentence. No full stops. No capital letters. The broken line. The floating white spaces where the reader gets to play.

Lloyd Jones

2 September 2024