In Disguise

There is a sense in which the better or more evolved of these poems strain towards philosophy as though towards John O'Loughlin's true destiny in writing, while yet retaining certain poetic values and tendencies which he was not, at the time, in a position to wholeheartedly reject from what he would regard as a morally or culturally superior vantage-point, as from the standpoint of one who had ‘seen through’ poetry and its ‘right’ to certain limitations. In retrospect, the author claims to find a number of these poems ideologically and intellectually specious or, at the very least, suspect; but he would not have got beyond this stage of his literary evolution without having gone through it in the first place, and some of them, one has to admit, still impress one with their boldness, imaginative flair, spiritual insightfulness, and sheer poetic insolence. They may not be the wings upon which he have since grown accustomed to flying, but they at least enabled him to get off the ground and intimate of places and states of being which no purely mundane or overly romantic approach to poetry would even envisage, never mind set out for in the first place! In that respect, they are an integral part of a steady climb to rarer and finer latitudes of the mind and should therefore be read as a means to a higher end, rather than as a final statement on any of the subjects to which they purport to demonstrate some deeper knowledge. Yes, this author took poetry pretty seriously in the early 1970s and then again, after the best part of a decade, in the early-to-mid '80s, but had that not been the case the results would hardly have been so impressive or seemingly conclusive, no matter how much the 'philosopher' may claim to have been in 'poetic' disguise!.