Versus : Last poems
Alan Loney
Prologue by Marion May Campbell
Published by Plumb Press, August 2024
ISBN 978-0-64686-402-0
152 × 229 mm
Paperback
96 pages
Early in 2022, at the age of 81, Alan Loney came to the decision that a separate discipline titled ‘poetry’ was no longer able to contain the writerly concerns that nevertheless still pressed him. This book, unfinished and unfinishable, registers that decision, that breach in a life previously devoted to the poem and to a self-identification as a poet. Recent work around the figure of the ancient Greek philosopher Herakleitos has required him to refocus his attention to the poetic nature of all language, all thought, all modes of writing. In this sense, Versus is not only an endpoint, but also a starting point of a major shift in his writing life.
Alan Loney’s longstanding attention to the nesting dolls of word, poem, page, book, library, and cosmos are lights that glow within the magnificent Versus. Inviting an array of fellow poets, historical figures, daily observations, dreamscapes, and typography into conversation, Loney applies his poet’s hand and printer’s eye to the pursuit of poetry and the life that accompanies it. Poignant, real as Spicer’s lemons, at the edge of precipice: Versus is a testament to, in Loney’s words, the impossibility and necessity of the poem.
— M C Kinniburgh, Granary Books, author of Wild Intelligence
This poet writes with an extraordinary care and precision, fascinated by what language can and can’t do in terms of grasping the world. Versus is an exceptional book with its striking ‘splinters’ of thought and dazzling flashes of perception. Loney is a major poet who brings a powerful attention to his writing, along with a philosophical questioning of even the simplest of things. Now his sense of time running out is making his probing even more intense.
— Roger Horrocks, poet, literary historian, University of Auckland
Here is a poet of rich utterance. From the time when as a young man he picked up his first set of drum sticks and joined a jazz band, the virtues of active hearing, astute phrasing and rhythmic tightness have come to be paramount for him. The same virtues instill meaningfulness in the way Alan Loney’s latest poems inhabit his pages in Versus. This volume delivers his particular music as sharply as ever.
— John Geraets, editor poetryremake
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