Rae Desmond Jones

There aren’t any Australian poets quite like Rae Desmond Jones, whose distinctive, unusual, and sometimes unsettling voice has been an important, though undervalued, force in Australian poetry since the early 1970s.

Blow Out is Rae Desmond Jones’s first collection of poetry, punctuated by novels and plays, since The Palace of Art (1981). His prominence during the 1970s is evinced by his publishing four books of poetry within eight years and by his inclusion in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979). This is a long silence, but Jones, now in his late sixties, has filled it with political activism, serving as mayor of Sydney’s Ashfield Council from 2004 to 2006. So much for unacknowledged legislators.

Rae Desmond Jones has joined the growing band of poets now working in the more expansive medium of prose diction (thereby possibly expanding their readership as well). Others that come to mind are David Malouf, Roger McDonald, and Rodney Hall.

At just 74 pages, Rae Desmond Jones’s first story collection gives the impression of being a slim volume. The contents page lists only ten stories. Yet this impression is deceptive. There are actually twelve stories (inexplicably, two aren’t listed in the contents), and the usual typography concentrates the prose, emphasizing its density and the sense of menace underlying the narratives.