Kirjahaku

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.

Poems set in Italy, Egypt, and Paris, reflecting on the varying cultures, and relating to contemporary life; more personal poems leading into a sequence, 'Tavern of Ruin', which, for a Sufi, is like training in a divine university. As Dr Javad Nurbakhsh puts it - 'Before a perfect being enters the 'Tavern of Ruin', he or she can be defined. However, upon entering the Truth, such a being is indefinable, beyond the realm of words' ('In The Tavern Of Ruins: Seven Essays On Sufism'). The other starting point is George Meredith's, "Modern Love'.

The essays contained in this volume include a number of substantial works: on the Yoga tradition, and how it has emerged in the modern age; on an exploration of the roots of the view of an absolutist god and the way this has shaped the development of Western civilisation; some reflections on what it is to be a human being in the world; an exploration of three significant figures: Freud, Plato, and Buddha so that they can be seen and compared as figures in a landscape today. There are also essays on Rudolf Steiner's Esotericism; the year 1948, that gave birth to the NHS and the State of Israel, and thoughts following the reading of 'The Essence of Nihilism' by Emmanuele Severino. Then there are some short pieces on: Buddhism; Death and Dying; the Buddha's Enlightenment in the Majjhima Nikaya and the Lalitavistara Sutra; Stanislav Grof's The Cosmic Game; the cosmopsychism of Itay Shani and on Greek Tragedy.