Gordon Ellis Knihy

Is At Times End a single long poem or a sequence of poems? It occupies an in-between space, a twilight language, that shifts between locations and registers.Where everything is subject to dissolution and re-emergence, playing on the fragility and fluidity of our existence, where dream and reality interplay as one in our experience, behind which there is nothing else. As it says in the Heart Sutra: 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'.Gordon Ellis was born in 1948 of Scottish-Irish descent and was brought up between inner city Birmingham and Gourock on the Firth of Clyde, his family having roots in Ballymena in Co.Antrim. He studied philosophy, literature and religion at university and went on to do research in Hindu iconography. He has taught at university in England, practiced as a psychotherapist, and been spiritual director of a Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Cheshire. Poets he has been influenced by include: Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, W.S.Graham, Ernst Meister, Gunnar Ekelof and Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty. As well as a number of books of poetry, he has also published several books of essays, including, 'Avoiding Extinction' co-authored with Alexander Matthews. He now lives in South Devon.

'The Broken Shards' contains lyrical poems concerned with the fragility and transience of being, of recollection and association. Personal and historical, celebratory, and challenging received views, these poems express another perspective outside the mainstream tradition in England, one where it is possible to breathe and aspire. Existential in their import, shifting in their mood and colouration, they are occasions for reflection and exploration.