Jill Jones
You could regard this latest book by Helen Garner as simply a collection of various essays, a miscellany if you wish, but to do so would be to give it less than its due. There is nothing casual or accidental about Everywhere I Look. Its coherence may, of course, have much to do with Garner's voice, which is consistent and compelling, as is her actual writin ...
Peter Kenneally reviews 'The Fox Petition' by Jennifer Maiden, 'Breaking the Days' by Jill Jones and 'Exhumed' by Cassandra Atherton
From the cover of Jennifer Maiden's latest book (The Fox Petition, Giramondo, $24 pb, 96 pp, 9781922146946), a wood-cut fox stares the reader down. This foreign, seditious animal is the perfect emblem for Maiden's examination of the xenophobia, conformity, and general moral diminution that she sees around her. Giramondo have given Maiden the liberty of an a ...
I am history now
in the scales, the age of sounds
I make sense then drop it
it gets dirty, it breaks
the ants carry it
I am bent at the switch
my tapes of the archive
decay, loops stutter
glitch arias
I am bent at the floor
facts roll under the chair
little dust songs
or songs outside
the parrots know
and I am sti ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Temper' by Jill Jones
They say morning's temper
binds you to this world
of taking. As if the air said,
all you need is to scram
or laugh. If it's real payback,
why try to earn it.
There are better things to do
with your shoes.
This is no mystery.
Movement chafes expectancy
till it hurts and hackles.
It's a pissing contest,
round that hew
the hours hand ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Memory Lapses and Clues, or "Don’t Forget to Remember"' by Jill Jones
Amongst discarded data, twigs,
plastic containers, fingernails –
'The unconscious, at all events,
knows no time limit' –
the shape of an ear, marginal facts
blown about by a northerly,
washed by stiffening rain – something
like symptoms, clues, bird spit,
possum fur, leaf miner, blood and bone,
a story or many of what passes
through here d ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Come in Colours' by Jill Jones
Sometimes it's better in our clothes.
We are together as we are not,
we come as we are.
The sky is immense and frail,
we are full of lists and feedback,
there are no private numbers.
Why does everyone care?
The smell of sun is in the
lees.
A flower is a flower, flowers now
becoming a book of consummations.
As light enters a house,
ther ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | 'Smooching the Parameters' by Jill Jones
This may be the new hunger, walking
through buildings that are off limits.
Fraught kisses on the carpark stairs.
Tripping on rubble that does not build.
Meanwhile, the clucky gestures
towards klutzy. Choices that seem
wrong somehow. Sentiment or sensibility.
A plantation daring not to flower.
A vacant bouquet you can't throw
over the skyline. A table ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | About Jill Jones
Jill Jones (photograph by Annette Willis)
Jill Jones has published nine books of ...
Jennifer Maiden is a great experimenter – in a specific sense. In a 2006 interview in The Age she said: ‘I have always found poetry a useful tool for tactical and ethical problem-solving … I suppose it’s a laboratory for testing out ideas.’ Maiden works from an ethical stance, but not, as some critics and readers have assumed, a facile leftist one (whatever ‘left’ means in the twenty-first century). The poems in this latest book are mainly discursive, and many address political situations, issues and, more specifically, public figures and personae.
... (read more)
In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark on or absorb the world’s beauty and peril. Many of these poems consequently feel insubstantial and vague, though that may be their aim – to suggest, to hint at something, to sketch in mystery, rather than to pin it down.
... (read more)