A Way of Seeing: Perception, Imagination, and Poetry - Softcover

Allison, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158420012X ISBN 13: 9781584200123

Publisher: Lindisfarne Books, 2003

Synopsis

We usually think of imagination as a fanciful, whimsical faculty that has little to do with reality and truth. This beautifully written book by the Australian poet John Allison shows how ordinary imagination can be intensified to become an organ of cognition―a path of development to real knowing.

Allison shows how poetry―poetic knowing and seeing―can reveal aspects of the world invisible to science. Three lucid chapters describe the path to true imagination, where attention is the key. First we must practice it, then we must become aware of the processes involved in it. Learning to experience “poise,” we must come to terms with the shadow―or all that says “No” in us. The combination of attention, equanimity, and assent opens the world in a new way.

Allison then examines how poets have actually developed and practiced the kind of “deep seeing” that “image work” involves. For this he draws on William Shakespeare, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Octavio Paz. The author concludes with a sequence of his own poems that exemplify the philosophy and practice he has developed.

Contents:

• Preface: “A Way of Seeing”
• One: “Developing Imagination”:

  Attending to Attentiveness

  Experiencing Poise

  Developing Imagination

  Owning the Shadow

  Getting It

• Two: “Poets and Imagination”:

  Freeing Imagination from Fancy

  Negative Capability

  Deep Seeing

  Instress and Inscape

  Heartwork

• Three: “The Poetic Image”:

  Another Way of Seeing Things

• Four: “Seeing Things”:

  Living in the World

  Connections

  Three Portals of Imagination

  Otanerito Triptych: Crossings

  Indwelling the Overlap

  Catlins Gateway

  Reflected Light

  Seeing Things II

About this title

About the Author

John Allison is a former Waldorf teacher, now active in management consultancy and lecturing. He is also a musician, playing the renaissance lute and cittern, and an established poet with three published collections and many poems printed in journals worldwide. Born in New Zealand, he now lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne with his wife Bettye. His children, all musicians, live in Cologne, London and San Francisco respectively.

Review

Always the return, this dreaded journey
through the innards of experience
towards that moment when
the rope the three fate-weaving sisters
made so skillfully had come apart,
the frayed ends springing out,
untwisting from the core that was your life.
Always, this return is beckoning to you.

And you have known since that time
that if you ever do intend
to splice the rope and make it whole
again, you must return to stand
before the guarded gate.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 158420012X
• ISBN 13: 9781584200123
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160