Jill Jones

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Biographical note:  Jill Jones is a Sydney poet. She won the Mary Gilmore Award in 1993 for her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star. The Book of Possibilities, her third book, was shortlisted for the National Book Council, The Age Book of the Year and Adelaide Festival Awards. Her fourth book, Screens Jets Heaven: New & Selected Poems, won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2003.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710416
ISBN-10:  1844710416
ISBN-13:  9781844710416
Author:  Jill Jones
Title:  Broken/Open
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-05
Extent:  160pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  240 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  These poems are traces and markings through continuous topographies—streets, shores, bodies. They offer an experience of language underway, of jumping into the midst. Their shifts and discontinuities open up spaces through the immediate, memory, the personal, the difficulties of being situated or identified. Many of them are shards, borrowings and reshapings of forms, overheard dialogue and writings and art by others, signs and relics of the concrete world, tensions in a moment, the overturning of the ordinary like a leaf, and the resistance of playing at edges.

Jones uses the soundtracks of modern lives—weather and television, music and journeys—as she negotiates difficult harbours and debatable terrains with perhaps more tenderness than previously in these times which seem broken and open. The poems are also voicings of a self under pressure, or close to breaking into the open, imagined, uncertain. They juggle a distrust of too many explanations and a wanting to know, to investigate through word magic and formal strategies.

More than ever, locations and displacements interest this poet, the incompleteness of all journeys, gaps and mistakes, where gaps are not empty, where absence is presence. The moves in the book work at times against Jones’ usual reception as an urban poet with a broader mapping than before. Some of the writing is sparser and more open, the meditative lyricism is tempered with a humorous scepticism and argument, the poems more intuitive. Longer sequences and serial poems blend the topical and musical with a subtlety of feeling, an ear for taut lineation strung together on a thread of three or four presiding images. ‘The pages colour with the various, speaking skin of it, life.’

Table of contents:
birds/updraft . . .
Winged
Facing the Harbour
Heat in a Room
The Dissolve
Fugitive comfort
Veer
Sea and Star
down on the lawn . . .
Dream Garden
TV Star Asana
On and Off Screen
Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries
A Vision
Colours Swim
Happiness
The Heat
Doubting Sleep
Driving Night Out
A Telephone, a Saxophone
Hazed
The Hushing
A Calling
all that’s gone . . .
The Reborn
I Was Walking
Fields of Engagement
Among the Columns
No regrets
Too Many Explanations
Night Visitor
The Loss Burns
Speed of Breaking
Hope
Sun Before the Long Wait
as if . . .
Midstream
Displacements
Bridge
Difficult Harbour
Brown
The Mini Series
Her Back Pages
The 7.17 Silver Machine
The Present, Not Quite Straight
Air Poetry
The New Aesthetic
Influences
30scapes
shards . . .
Destiny Pleasures
Conditioned At the Bar. No. 5
Rain and Miles
Limits We’ve Shouldered
Under the Weather
Despite and Blessings
Big Pearly Moon
As Cold Wakes
Long
Down road
Edge/Past
Futures and stardust
It Comes Through
An Afternoon Walk
Amicable Wolves
First Taste
seizures . . .
The Moments Tango
Yeah, yeah
One and Another
Cowboys
Remains the Same
This is Friday High Up
Slicing the Path
Apocalyptic Tendency
From the Strait
Liberty Changes
ecstasy on a verandah . . .
To Sleep Inside Rain
Golden Scree
Smoked Out
A door
The Real Me
Song
Pavilions of Longing
Scented Even In Sleep
The Skim
Licks of Autumn
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Difficult Harbour

when your life flashes
grey wood curled nautilus
a bottle of johnny
before you
samples tapping
above oceanic
stink of tide
waves recollect you

hard breakwater stands
you were never
walking away
last as ancient calcium
carbonate
rhizomorphs
casting kelp bones

flies stinging
bird rock castles
noise nests of gothic
rocky scarped guano
makes you grassy edgy
shying into albatross flap

a sand of clouds
white and rusty cling
orange diamond guides
steel light
vessel crust
only 30 metres will save you
from grounding

Unpublished endorsement :  In the last few years, Australian poet Jill Jones has emerged as a writer of extraordinary fluency and richness. These new poems, often trance-like and fragmentary, grow from a deep sense of temporal process and the mobility of feeling. They capture the quick and the pulse of the world around them. If they are hard to define, that is because Jones gathers words and speech on the move. If they are hard to resist, that is because there is, unusual in contemporary poetry, a genuine tenderness and intimacy in her writing. What results is a poetry both subtle and very beautiful, both inward and intensely aware of the objective world.

Martin Harrison

Unpublished endorsement :  Jill Jones‚ poems are trusting, human and exact. They anticipate possibility, the invisible, sometimes abrupt edges of comprehension, while inviting alert contact with the material world. This work is sharp, sassy and maturely anti-romantic, sorting the strengths of contemporary Australian poetry.

Peter Minter