Broken/Open by Jill Jones Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2005   Shortlisted, The Age Poetry Book of the Year 2005 & Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2006
	The poems in Broken/Open are traces and markings through continuous topographies: streets, shores, bodies. They use the soundtracks of modern lives to negotiate difficult harbours and debatable terrains in these times which seem broken and open. They 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.   What the critics have said: "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. ... What results is a poetry both subtle and very beautiful, both inward and intensely aware of the objective world." - Martin Harrison "What I have loved especially in Jones' poetry, and find again over and over in this collection, is the way she uses poetry to create a free self - positive, humane, fully exposed to life. It is at this level that I think of her work as having a spiritual kinship to Frank O'Hara and early Ashbery ­ that beautiful rich innocence in which, using a contemporary unpretentious vocabulary, they were able to state the passionate exposure of living in a post-religious, post-grandiose world. Like Montale, another kindred spirit, Jones intuits that the tragic, the beautiful, the truly important will find their expression here in our everydayness." - Peter Boyle. The Famous Reporter "The result is poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty. The art of this book lies in the precision with which it renders the glassiness of things, the shatterings, without having to say so - passionate and parodic at once, as cool as all get out." - Barry Hill, The Australian "... acutely aware of the slipperiness of language, of the impossibility of denoting meaning, of putting into words sketching a broken world through sometimes cryptic, sometimes jubilant annotations." - Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review "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 "There is simultaneously an awareness of the interconnectedness of life and the needs of language, a poetry where emotion is integrated with the quiet power of the intelligence behind them. This is a wonderful book full of cadence and meaning, rich and complex. I enjoyed it immensely and continue to enjoy it. Buy it and don't leave it on your bookshelf. Broken/Open is about the struggle and radiance of living a life." - Angela Gardner, foam:e Shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year 2005 Judge's comments: "Broken/Open courts the great themes of modern poetry notwithstanding Jill Jones' obvious affiliation with "language poetry", a practice often implying the abandonment of traditional subject and object relations and the dislocation of syntax and grammar. In her case the celebration of language itself is variously grafted to her poems of romantic love, the experience of nature, evocations of the city. Writing that calls attention to itself by deformation of narrative or extreme elision often jeopardises the beauty of shape, sound and perception, yet many of these poems are riveting examples of poetry's pure pleasure." Kris Hemensley Shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2006 Judges' comments "In Broken/Open the poems often open with sharp, pithy statements, for these are lyrics which move in a tense, terse fast-lane. And this is interesting because of the intimacy of tones involved is almost too over the top at times, as if Jill Jones knew you personally and expected you to travel with her (an adventurous reader will always accept such an invitation). At 144 pages some poets' 'Collected Poems' are this size, so Jones has little problem in marshalling her fecundity and this is aided by the sheer variety of what she writes about (for these are solid, meaningful poems that certainly have subject matter). The best work is towards the end of the book: love, longing, physical craving, celebration of nature, the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of life are particularly captured in this group of poems. Early in her career she hitched her star the wonderful 'Go anywhere, write on anything, in any style' tradition and this still very much sustains her." Salt Publishing has more details regarding ordering of this title.
Heat in a Room January soaks the hill with white sky grass writes into blood and a river of heat sings Music loads the morning with legends an afterimage of crowds reaching into a room Small dried packages of territory remain unturned there is whispering outside under the redemption of intervals Just as silence deciphers light exchange rates cycle gently through conversations And days draft me, breathing extinction my skin a chassis of orange As for the car, it shimmers into the raging sunset then sort of erupts (a kind of persistent hope that nobody gets caught) The night's hangers are loose in the closet sleep is a projection, part of the weightlessness It is impending ­ a delicate sense of the flange it seems as though the room is small.       Sun Before the Long Wait Branches twist to the shape of sun crushed leaves that lead fractured, prismatic, but catch on, listen I've contemplated the break out traded with desire, rumoured the wait. Moving into a small valley of sun across bark, fragrant trails, where they've led a hollow where I bend to listen move through sky dark with universe out how long to have not, how long to wait. Free of excuses, lizards in sun sung sharp on glass, break my dense lead this is welcome ­ suspended where houses listen trace the broken fence, timing winter out the grapple I can't heft, rhyme or weight. Days of emission, mist drift, red sun I worry if my questions twist like lead as a deal, contract, augmented, a lesson looking for excuses never found out unexamined in body woe, or wait. Fragments of time, moon-time, flicker sun broken down to uncertain, as if to lead forgotten tortures, being made to listen abandoning the long slide out passage of skin breeze, abandon the weight. Break gods on the steps under a forgotten sun unwind what goes along, and what is led fears that can't approve or anxieties listen time toughs the excuses out having been released from the long wait.   Clouds to Powder Faint at windows, forces while the street is lost blooming ground to powder searches ­ talked into the wee hours ­ a large cluster chants into the slack wire falling down camera's vantage need a little scenery now slightly entertaining edged banana leaves clatter this descending motion evaporates clouds dusty scales precipices shivered afterburner on ... looks back up at sky) keys in hand) as if to complain it's cold ... your door, off my ... beautiful scarlet gust, sound of rasps breathing the breath stepping on something slippery ­ I can't ­ wait there isn't enough breeze smokes, beat a mist into air shower noisily on skin, the soft full moon filters through, forget days start from sound, restless, pursued rhythmic science on a dry branch I have managed to take a morning lurch along, raising more then can number wisdom mumbled, assorted pings, thumps scrapes, flashing black silk, don't go climbing up to\the blue disappear in dark coughs nerves, residents alarmed by haze but culprit patterns keep smoke the cumulus still wails in rows fatbellied internal rattles, rising barometer follows lit plumes, elaborate, beautiful the dance lasts glittery pink w/tinsel extensions reminded of dawn backing up its old sign with the rainbow painted on damp pass of clouds life occurred in the early morning paper mâche punctuality dozing a swollen sun drop quivers, a rented minibus dissipates, revealing, salted at first light, shown the count     30scapes A cento And the bay falls over itself then as you walk right out between the window and the highway with no sure landing, just lines of scrub the air around the engines shimmers waiting to move. The actual is fragmented and askew where in the beery cool a sparrow hunches. Stare at us huddled in a doorway coiled in the pylons flashes out of sight in the weight of brief spaces. Something in the air has changed squeak of plastic mutter increase papers as coins in pocket sigh deep lazy minds sweat in their shells. You know we have to pay when the red wagons show up for no reason after the hot bus journey, at the border ­ like us be like us and exist caught as catch can. There is talk of sanctuary. Waking up to whitewashed plasterboard above a glinting choppy bay beneath a nervous shine wafts on the breeze. Currawongs squawk the belief that nothing is beyond the wind. Clocks chime a raggedy hour here almost in sight of the city and the river's muddy presence. Falling sand, over there fast fold fast fold and swallow up the bay. This cento consists solely of 30 lines taken (with only small adjustments made for punctuation) from the following 30 poems, in the order they were published, in Landscape Poems, edited by Jill Jones, Poetry Espresso, March 2002: Lawrence Upton, 'Pol Dhu, heading North'; Les Wicks, 'Blood's red noise'; Peter Boyle, 'Portrait of genius with sump oil and retreads'; Cassie Lewis, 'Lake Michigan Sleeps'; Angela Gardner, 'Flight from Canberra'; Alaric Sumner, 'Geographix'; Jen Crawford, 'Port Kembla (1)'; Pam Brown, 'In The New Berlin'; Frances Sbrocchi, 'Okanagan'; S.K.Kelen, 'O'Connor Ridge'; Martin Langford, 'Broken Bay'; David Prater, '7 mobile phone text messages'; Alaric Sumner, 'Interactive Geophony'; Robert Kennedy, 'Firestorm'; Melissa Jane, 'Frauenhaus'; Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, 'The Border'; Michael Farrell, 'fallow house'; Lawrence Upton, from 'WEST'; Les Wicks, 'Someone said'; Cassie Lewis, 'Temple'; Pam Brown, 'In Brittany'; Jen Crawford, 'Earlwood'; S.K. Kelen, 'Kambah Pool'; Brook Emery, 'For my brother and my sister'; Andrew Burke, 'Tankas'; Angela Gardner, 'Early evening/Shifting boundaries'; Peter Boyle, 'Scavenger'; Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, 'Shoalhaven Heads'; Candice Ward, 'thorn of the down'; Robert Kennedy, 'Learning'. Copyright Jill Jones Updated 17 April 2006

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