Jill Jones

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Biographical note:  Jill Jones is a Sydney poet and writer. Her work has been published extensively in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA and UK. Her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, won the Mary Gilmore Award in 1993. The Book of Possibilities, 1997, was shortlisted for the National Book Council ‘Banjo’ Awards and the Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize. She has worked as a journalist, book editor and public servant. In 1995 she co-edited the anthology A Parachute of Blue (Round Table Publications).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857226
ISBN-10:  1876857226
ISBN-13:  9781876857226
Author:  Jill Jones
Title:  Screens Jets Heaven
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-02
Extent:  152pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  228 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.95
Price:  USD 13.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Screens jets Heaven contains a selection of poems from Jill Jones's previously published books, followed by a solid selection of new and uncollected poems. The work is intellectually sharp, alternately tough, lyrical, fibrous, dangerous, sceptical and delicate, characterized by clear-eyed imagery, taut lineation, humour and a distinctive mellifluous rhythm. Jones explores the boundaries of inner and outer experience, the shifts and discontinuities between fact and possibility. Hers is often a poetry of atmospheres – physical, emotional, etheric as it encompasses and moves through the grit and clamour of streets and neighbourhoods, the traffic of both road and air, harbours and city office blocks, work life, domesticity, the passions of the heart. She is an exploratory, expansive poet: nature (both terrestrial and celestial), the movement of the elements and weather, various affects of night and day are integrated within her human, psychic landscapes as a way of engaging with the rhapsodic. Her work is concerned with both the physical and material as well as more subtle levels of feeling and inner consciousness. Throughout the collection there is an involvement with the nature and quality of urban and inner suburban existence – as represented by the city of Sydney. The poet's persona observes, engages with, absorbs, scrutinizes and meditates on contemporary urban existence, in all its various tempers and tones. She invites the reader to share in the speculative processes of discovery. Overall this is a powerful collection, characterised by a sensual richness and a surrealist, transformative energy.

Table of contents:
from The Mask and the Jagged Star 1992
Saturday morning in Ashfield
Conversations in cars with the engine running
If you’re in the neibourhood
Hyperventilating in the supermarket
Nosferatu in the suburbs
Third floor outrider
In the distance on the verandah
Around the white vase
Soap opera salad
Transformations in a city block
Gathering of tribes
You are so correct now
The phantom division
Trying to steal the myth of lawns and fences
Cruising on a ridge of silence
Boys go crazy
What you’ve lost is what you keep on losing
Fire on the harbour
The new laws of contracts
The coming of the death star
Mother i am waiting now to tell you
Balcony
from Flagging Down Time
The power of a room
Under the dust of living arrangements
The names of birds
Insect at the window
The desert
When planets softly collide
Elegy for a breath
The waves of midnight
The lines of a solo
Inside and outside houses
Night gardens
Every bar, every star
There’s knowledge and then the sky
Balancing on darkness
From the kingdom of luggage trolleys
A construction of radiance
The mountain’s chorus
Eleven fifteen
from The Book of Possibilities 1997
Mozart walking by
The white sail
Woke up this morning in the crystal shop
Solitary October
The sweet life of midnight
Invitation
Ideas of sirens
Like Dante in the library
The deep bowls of winter
in deep, down past sleep
Songs of the evening air
The pure in heart
Disrepair
Writing her big sleep
The kitchen light
The tax form
Friday on the balcony
White windows
Negotiation on the tenth floor balcony
Antipodean geography
Cats quarrelling outside a window
Reputation
Interspersed
The book of possibilities
Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Uncollected Poems
Night falls over Ruby Street
A lesson from idle reading
The Elvis Costello poem
The night of the marriage
After an autumn funeral
Whispers and courses
Train in vain
This business of love
The plate glass gain
In the deep sepulchre of dance
A conjunction of bone photos
April’s rescue
A white beach
Fireposts in strange territories
The lane discovered
Memory runs alongside
Marrickville sonnet
Sliding doors
The balance of autumn
The late century
A taste for hunger
Futurism at night
Unknown
The dead tides
Rust
Sulphur
Along the dark silk smooth road
In the key of night-winds
The night before your return
It’s a long journey anyway
Screens, jets, heaven
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Under the dust of living arrangements

Perhaps you thought you had forgotten this
song rolling out of a stranger’s car radio
but you rebuild memory, a microsecond
before each note. It lies
beneath a pile of other forgotten aides-memoire.
All new living arrangements dictate
some things must lie dormant, unreminisced
until chance encounters strip
the film away.
You wonder what you could have been doing
all this time at one surface or another
struggling, drowning, coming up for air.
Once there was an evening of dust
web night, silent
faltering, among bush homeland birds
their last calls, your last drinks
mist to midnight on the old verandah.
You trying to keep distant from any magic
but aware now of the bush spiders out there
building a fragile stubbornness.
You with eyes that grow into dark
sense that old spirit stalking, calling
beyond you to friends of the elements
even the taste of dust.
Tomorrow is always brooms and rags
the last drink always distilled, second-hand magic.
This house never so silent, though it still cries
under the piles, pictures and scrawl of memory
in the dusty corner of your new living arrangements.

Review quote:  Jones’ work is so easy on the eye and senses, you wonder what tricks she has just slipped through your inattentive gaps, because you know she has disturbed you in the most devious sort of way. Her style is one of the waiting thunderstorm amidst the tight stasis of before-rain.

Bev Braune
Australian Women’s Book Review

Review quote:  One of those poets who is beginning to move Australian poetry into new directions – towards a greater trust than ever in the poet's own responses, a quietening of judgemental implications, and a desire to be able to articulate positive emotion, to find ways of exploring the rhapsodic.

Martin Langford
Southerly

Review quote:  One of the most exciting voices in contemporary Australian poetry … a rich layering of image and idea, an archaeology of fiercely intellectual, and poignantly vulnerable insight and juxtaposition.

Rose Lucas
Australian Women’s Book Review

Review quote:  Urban evocations both heartfelt and gritty.

Alan Wearne
The Age