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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

Four for Just One

1 What use, what reason, can there be In loving like this, where there is No certain promise of equal return? But expressed, written out like this,…

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The Pont Mirabeau

Under the pont Mirabeau flows the Seine          With it our loves     And strange to be minded Joy follows always after pain   Let night come…

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Little Things

You said to me once, “All little things are Happy.” Could we have been looking toward The paddocks and the animals you kept? Or were we watching…

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What is Now

What is now, is not this Only, but is all time, All places – with those Ahead and those behind In one – and so now too…

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A Kind of Walking

For P & M-A   What is it in truth to love another? Surely this Of all things has been expressed, described, Repeated to exhaustion, is in…

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Piper Alpha

In honour of the 167 who died in the Occidental (Oxy) Piper Alpha oil platform disaster in the North Sea, 6th - 7th July 1988, British, American,…

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Shadows

So many shadows Have come Into this house. Under every dining chair Lies an architecture, A fretwork, of dusk. The edge of the phone Where it lies…

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1564

It has no meaning in itself, but may offer one: To the incidence that Shakespeare was born In the year Michelangelo died, it’s fair to say “So…

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Spring Rain

A fine light moisture drifts to earth In natural silence - it has nothing To say, no endowment of, nor cause For voice - it is, and…

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Footwear: A Poem

I know I don’t need another pair of shoes, But they, I see – although second-hand – Are finely made - to my mind, beautiful: The standard…

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