Ann Gray says:
now is an extraordinary collection of belting poems. JK Lawson can do anything, and he does - black humour living miracle, some guy upstairs; cynicism muse; horror lullaby in a minefield; yet his nightmares take you by surprise, speak with unexpected tenderness. Above all he is a watcher, a watcher who needs and hopes to tell the truth:
if im lucky tonight
i might wake up
before its all over
before too soon
becomes the last dance
lucky night
Be lucky tonight. Read this. You’ll be blown away.
David Scribner, editor, The Berkshire Edge says:
I first knew John Lawson as the gifted artist whose stunning collages assembled fragments of reality into a new coherence, one that changed how you perceived yourself and the world around you. His poems are no less remarkable, resonating with a profound understanding of the ironies of human condition while conveying an abiding indignation at the hypocrisies of human behavior.
David Woolley says:
While the voice is strikingly his own, the influences and echoes in JK Lawson’s poetry include Whitman and Ginsberg, Steinbeck, Faulkner, the Dylans (Thomas and Bob), Waits, Merwin and Carver. The idiom here is perfectly American, yet with an air of British detachment. These poems are at once joyful and angry, celebratory and disappointed, hilarious and tragic, raving and utterly sensible. They’re powered by the driving pulse of spoken language, the heart-beat of pumping syntax, the natural pause of the line and stanza-break. Lawson has great narrative skill, powerful characters, a painter’s eye for detail, raw and truthful source material. His world is full of wonder yet he wonders, as we all must, why we’ve driven that world to the edge of the cliff. now leaves us now, see-sawing on the edge of our own stupidity, almost done, but perhaps with a little breath of hope:
i am here and this is nothing
and this is nothing
and this nothing
can be
absolutely everything
