{"product_id":"empty-grandstand","title":"Empty Grandstand","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference - places, people, politics and importantly, language.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.","brand":"Unity Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44035618504901,"sku":"","price":30.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0625\/6679\/3413\/files\/The_20Empty_20Grandstand.jpg?v=1725412301","url":"https:\/\/unitybooks.myshopify.com\/products\/empty-grandstand","provider":"Unity Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}