Screens
Jets Heaven:
New
& Selected Poems
by
Jill Jones
Salt Publishing,
Cambridge, 2002
Winner,
2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize
NSW
Premier's Literary Awards.
Screens Jets Heaven contains selections from Jill Jones' first three books plus a number of new and uncollected poems.
"Jill Jones' poems are remarkable for their perceptions and insights, at once gentle yet resistant, accessible yet strict; the language assured in its effects and selection of detail. Her use of the meditative lyric is both masterful and compelling." Judith Beveridge
"Jill Jones' poetry is
both juicy and intimate. But underneath its lovely Sydney tang
of sun and harbour is a dark destabilising smell of trouble.
This is a complex and fascinating book." Dorothy Porter
What the
2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize judges said:
"This collection
contains a selection of poems from Jill Jones's previously published
books, The Mask and the Jagged Star (1992), Flagging
Down Time (1993), and The Book of Possibilities (1997),
and is followed by a solid selection of new and uncollected poems,
'Screens Jets Heaven' - the title of the book.
One of the strengths of the book is its sense of wholeness. 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 reflects on, often meditatively, contemporary
urban existence, in all its various tempers and tones. Jones
is concerned with both the physical material level and the more
subtle levels of feeling and inner consciousness. Her poetry
is often a poetry of atmospheres - physical, emotional, etheric.
The breadth of her vision encompasses, moves through, the grit
and clamour of the streets and neighbourhood, the traffic of
both road and air, the harbour, the city office block, work life,
the life of the home, the passions of the heart.
She is an inclusive, expansive poet: nature (both terrestrial
and celestial), the behaviours of the elements and the weather,
the various affects of night and day are integrated within her
human, psychic landscapes/thoughtscapes. While she acknowledges
the flaws and shadows inherent in existence - her poems often
emanating a melancholic aura - a guardedly affirmative perspective
ultimately emerges from this book. Lucid, clear imagery, succinct
and measured phrasing, and a distinctively quiet, calm, exact
and almost mellifluous rhythm in her poetic voice will impress
a reader of her work."
What the critics have said about Screens Jets Heaven:
"her best work has a surrealist, transformative energy ... and her work as a whole is marked by a kind of hopeful melancholy. ... She looks with clarity - with neither coldness nor sentimentality - at desire, longing and loss." David McCooey, Australian Book Review
"a rich, essentially celebratory snapshot of urban life, truly lived. ... The new and uncollected segment has fine work. 'In The Deep Sepulchre of Dance' leaves you sweaty. I've found it hard to leave the page at the end of "This Business of Love', 'Rust', 'Sulphur' and 'Screens, Jets, Heaven'." Les Wicks, The Famous Reporter
"Jones'
poems are energised by an engagement with the thresholds where
the public and the private, the social and domestic, the political
and the personal meet. ... the rhythms and cadences finding resonance
in the intricate connections of thought and image ... certainly
one of our best practitioners of the meditative urban lyric,
playing the range of both the soft and hard pedals." Judith Beveridge, Southerly
What the critics have said of her other books included in the Selected sections of the book:
"Jill Jones writes with convincing paranoia - an outsider who knows what it feels like to be inside." Kevin Brophy, Going Down Swinging
"Jones' work is intellectually sharp, extending itself, but always accessible. It's tough, lyrical, fibrous and delicate." Lynette Kirby, Australian Book Review
"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
Salt Publishing has more details regarding ordering of this title.
Some poems from Screens Jets Heaven.
Whispers
and courses
Air urges through my waking
cells.
Day breathes thicker, houses exhale us.
We people the streets with our week time
dance, impatient with the tinnitus of hours.
But wind gives the day its
wings, invisible
from this window. And makes space
for light more clear than freshest water,
more bright than silvered glass.
The course of leaves and sound
becomes
a float, a feather-delicate scrape. Each tree
hands on whispers. They translate through
lane corridors into a constant hushing -
catch on squatting walls, arrow-headed
fences.
Like our concepts tracking what we think
should be in or outside - domains
of rocky edges, worlds of grass.
All suburban geometry, all
below the bed
of sky: pacific today, sometimes stormy.
However each day wakes, how it rides.
And how far we bend to catch its sound.
My horizon is a measure of
this present.
Continues its hours while I seek others.
And crisp yellow light squares some time
on paving, dry as summer rain.
A jet's hard silver and withdrawing
roar
says something nearly loud as absolute
of a further world, its borders, hungers, war.
And the trees reply by standing ground.
And what of a moon I leave
stranded there
out with the sun, dreaming other dreams?
Of places perhaps without sleep, grounds
of fire without hope, or even an hour's rest.
Far-off blizzards, lava, a
planet language
of ancient hollows, old sockets in stone.
Alive alongside deliriums of power,
and nights filled with missiles and eternity.
We've no big weather here,
forget blood's
course can be wild as the crush of cyclones
on coasts. For weeks this hill may live
with indolent light; night storms can please us.
And even here hurts whisper
over fences,
life lingers unnecessarily in a bed, mouths fight
and the smallest of deaths go to ground:
a bubble of yolk, the not-yet lived body.
When wind moves, ground receives,
breaks open life in scattered half-shells,
a dove's lost egg. I find with work's end
a colder, fuller moon, winter's promise.
While birds call the dark,
the smell of rain
drifts across the greying fence. Sun leaves
the sky its brief evening pink to night
and the relief of our half-blind hours.
Train in vain
The blue is vast and hot
where is it taking us?
We, to be somewhere
the platform, smoking summer.
The door swings only one way
this time
the writer was beaten by the past.
There is no driver on the train
it is safe to travel.
Did the voice say that?
It's a long climb to the outside
mind the oleanders - save your children.
The air is sliced
we would welcome it.
He is full of blue jeans
there are those who would welcome it.
It's the metal that stings
but you could argue about the high rise.
There's a little bleed in the
cutting
it goes brick by brick by brick.
There's nothing to be sought
you won't come to anyway.
Yellow ribbons in her hair
how excited can we get?
The Institute is red
the face of time is silver.
Museum, its brass, the past
we rush through underground.
If there are no exceptions
to all of this
please stand closer.
Futurism at night
I stayed up all night under
the world's dangling lamp and the shadow did not eclipse it.
I toed the Bokharan prayer mats and struggled with words along
the green stripe of the sofa. Of this, I am still accused, as
though I had thrown the first fruits at angels and glued the
hems of avatars to chair legs. I acknowledge the night is open
to speed and the push beyond pages, an overthrow of slow velvet
edges, but this is not war, the generals merely look sick in
the blue light and a tank twists in the ditch outside. Across
the fat cushions, along the hallway and around the cornices are
my placements but when I hit the road you will really see that
lamp swing, zooming beyond sense everyday. It's got past the
eternal now, each sentence talks from another in the house and
paragraphs tangle. You cannot unwire them as they conflict and
kiss, spreading tissue into tissue. Accuse me of some moist blaspheming
or of dropping articles as though I cannot be definite as an
army. Little lamp no slower than searchlights or blazes. Sentence
searching for another - zoom, zam, zaum - as it grows.
Copyright Jill Jones
Updated 15 August 2005