The form of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

A Midsummer Night's Deam, Act 5

Denham Grierson’s new volume of poems gladly acknowledges that the poet’s craft and art is unlike any other genre of writing and composition. The thoughts and words come often unbidden, unresolved, into the poet’s consciousness, requiring openness, hesitancy and perhaps, above all, a degree of humility in offering what are ultimately reflections on situations and realities experienced personally and socially in our troubled world.

In ‘times of heaviness’, the poet seeks to bring light and air, to offer hope, to remind us of kindness, compassion and the other utterly human values that help us experience the goodness of life in all its expressions. He writes: ‘… each poem carries a gift to be received, and vistas to be discerned and contemplated. It is hoped they will do their work well’.

Of their nature, all poems are unfinished. Only in our reading do we notice those things unknown and unnoticed; the gifts offered for our consolation; the words that express awareness, longing, challenge and the possibility of fulfilment in our journey.

In this volume, we are sometimes gently, and sometimes starkly, reminded that the weight of the world cannot be allowed to rob us of beauty, inside our own lives, and inside our natural settings. – Foreword by Thomas Gallen

Denham Grierson, a retired Uniting Church Minister, first had poems printed in his school magazine. Over the years in his writings and speaking engagements the occasional poem appeared, but only in retirement from thirty years of tertiary teaching, and forty years of ministry, has the time been available to focus on poetry, that access into the depths of our lives, as Denham describes it. There is still time for golf, family, and travel but they too are resources for writing poems.