The Empty Grandstand cover art

The Empty Grandstand

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Empty Grandstand

By: Lloyd Jones
Narrated by: Lloyd Jones
Try Premium Plus free

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $12.99

Buy Now for $12.99

About this listen

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.

©2024 Lloyd Jones (P)2024 Bolinda Publishing
Poetry Themes & Styles
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.