Ebooks by John O'Loughlin from Centretruths

Drawn from several previous volumes, this collection of lyric poetry, comprised of rhymed poems and free verse, dates from the early 1970s and reveals the slow growth, out of a conventionally youthful romanticism, of a philosophical-cum-ideological approach to poetry which became characteristic of all John O'Loughlin's literary work in the 1980s, as though transitional to an uninhibitedly philosophical phase of writings to come which would leave even philosophical literature, including fiction, severely in the lurch. Therefore there is a sense in which these poems strain towards philosophy as though towards the author's true destiny in writing, while yet retaining certain poetic values and tendencies which he was not, at that time, in a position to wholeheartedly reject from a morally or culturally superior vantage-point, as from the standpoint of one who had ‘seen through’ poetry and its ‘right’ to certain limitations. In retrospect, we find many of these poems ideologically and intellectually specious or, at the very least, suspect; but Mr O'Loughlin would not have got beyond this stage of his literary evolution without having gone through it in the first place, and some of them, one has to admit, still impress one with their boldness, imaginative flair, spiritual insightfulness, and sheer poetic insolence. They may not be the wings upon which this author has since grown accustomed to flying, but at least they enabled him to get off the ground and intimate of places and states of being which no purely mundane or overly romantic approach to poetry would even envisage, never mind set out for in the first place! In that respect, they're an integral part of a steady climb to rarer and finer latitudes of the mind, and should therefore be read as a means to a higher end, rather than as a final statement on any of the subjects to which they purport to demonstrate some special knowledge. Yes, it would appear that John O'Loughlin took poetry pretty seriously in the early 1970s and then again, after the best part of a decade, in the early-to-mid 80s, but had that not been the case the results would not have been nearly so impressive or seemingly conclusive. – A Centretruths editorial.

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