Jill Jones

Jill Jones is an Australian poet who has published seven full-length books of poetry including Ash is Here, So are Stars (Walleah Press, 2012), Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), and Broken/Open (Salt, 2005). She has also published a number of chapbooks including Senses Working Out (Vagabond, 2012), Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005) and Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries (Wild Honey Press, 2004). A new e-chapbook, even if the signal fails, is due from Black Rider Press in August 2013 and a new full-length work, The Beautiful Anxiety, is due from Puncher and Wattmann late in 2013. She lives in Adelaide.

From 1992, until now and planned for the near future, I will have at least 13 books, chapbooks, and e-chapbooks published. This accounting ignores a couple of limited edition artist books, one chapbook of previously published work and some ephemeral and semi-ephemeral publications. For this baker’s dozen, then, I decided to choose one poem each from these 13 works. Not necessarily the most anthologised, nor most commented upon, nor most representative poem of each book (not at all, in some instances), nor my own favourites, but a series of works that show some ways into my writing (of course, there is much that isn’t represented here). They range through dialogic, lyric and ekphrastic poems, and poems made from impure chance operations, or semi-collage and diaristic fragments, though not all this may seem apparent. Sometimes these poems are more a language of experience and at other times they are more language as experience, but not in a pure way in either sense. If one wants to make those distinctions (as I don’t). I originally arranged them in a chronological order but decided to undo that, to get away from the idea of ‘development’ in a linear sense, so they are presented in strict alpha order. And I resisted the temptation to change some of the poems for others once I saw how the order fell.

AFTERNOON GREY IN afternoon sounding

not like a sign but a soughing

which is white over the night shoulder

bent with market crash not soughing

not sighing and never sign anything

you download in the grey afternoon

but let it and let it out and letting go

something with beautiful grey sounding

more beautiful that is going beautiful

in the garden is sometimes red or

sometimes pink and fall leaves all petaline

where more rain predicts more rain and rain

that is lovely letting go of something

that clicks before a storm do not click

do not buy but let go before the night

storm over your shoulder beautiful and

waiting for the moon changes its large

light that is not and not grey nor slim

not an insert not alternative not faux simple

not resounding but the coming moon

that cycles with that enduring the wind

touches and it touches where you grey

impermanent sounding sigh in a lithe

shoulder before you go down into before

you petals leaves and leaves you

from Senses Working Out, Vagabond Press, 2012

Note: This chapbook consists of a series of untitled poems, mostly first drafted over a period of weeks in the summer of late 2010.

A Moon, A Myth, A Feeler

A moon so clear as a bright eye

A moped so clear as a broadcast eyesore

A mortal so clear as a bronze facsimile

A motive so clear as a bright failure

A motor so clear as a brutal falconer

A mound so clear as a budgie fandango

A mug so clear as a bright fault

A mule so clear as a brittle fawn

A multitude so clear as a brocade feast

A murderer so clear as a bright feather

A musician so clear as a brittle feeler

A myth so clear as a bronze fender

from Even as the Signal Fails, Black Rider Press, due August 2013 (e-chapbook)

Note: This poem is atypical of the overall style of poems in the book.

A White Boat


A moment sings your hard life
against the pier

A voice dreams your thought
your spirit with all its rot

Music moves through night

a city lodges in you

A figure walks alone
disturbing order

You say 'I've just one other sea
one land more than this'

but your corpse enters
reminiscent of all aphrodisiacs. 



Not every road is a possible road
since you ruined time

Each judgement has its secrecy

the shutdowns of therefore

Each possible way
will destroy and endure, only you

Even in that moment
the white boat is here, for you

from The Beautiful Anxiety, Puncher and Wattmann, scheduled late 2013

Driving Night Out

In suits, corners

on white-tie boulevard.

You pray for the barbarians

their knowledge, their verse

their surety of wild horses.

O the angst of insurance and facial hair!

O the desire for it all meaning nothing!

The zero within the frame.

Dealers and bouffant guys

fuck wheels

with drink and our lip gloss lies.

White necessity

in the caves

the heart

the passages of eyes.

from Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries, Wild Honey Press, 2004 (chapbook)

[untitled]

electric

dark extends

footsteps among secrets

*

In a dream swirl, the sleet of life.

A frost had grasped the glass.

Radar to alien, I am landing at last.

If my actions are flawed, this yawing kite.

My shadow, my mist, my doorway’s constant companion.

I sleep next to my sole skin & below space.

from Passages: Annotations, Ungovernable Press, 2010 (pdf chapbook)

Note: This pdf book is an abridged version of a longer unpublished work which is composed of lineated poetry and prose fragments. The above is one page from the 2010 chapbook version.

Figure

I’m sometimes very like me.

I can’t get rid of the

poor little nonsense!

What can self do

with such visions?

Look at everything

with eyes

skirting the obscene.

Push on through

tearing the robe

exciting suspicions.

Always holding a little figure

something striking

very like me.

from Dark Bright Doors, Wakefield Press, 2010

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.

from Broken/Open, Salt Publishing, 2005

Mother I Am Waiting Now To Tell You

mother about the letters i never wrote

                                                the sirens outside batter my heart

and the fact i don't eat enough food

                                                reminding me i am hungry

all that heavy seductive stuff

                                                in the nights of new traffic in dreams

and i do not understand your eyes

                                                where there is so much blindness

the glare of your tenacity almost breathing

                                                i am struck down at the window

i have prayed to be that strong — resisting also

                                                death squads are squealing in backyards

but there is too much noise — two languages now

                                                spray painting names like manifestoes

like what you wanted me to be — like this

                                                i don't like the sound my fear makes

and like someone else who has my voice

                                                i talk to myself — begging that someone

who has my arms but speaks a different love

                                                will remember an answer to the enigma

which you have lost the words for

                                                i am waiting for them to tell me

i am waiting now to tell you

from The Mask and the Jagged Star, Hazard Press, 1992

Note: This poem can be read as one single poem, or as two separate poems, one down the left column and another down the right column.

  

Scratchings, Rust (excerpt from 'Where We Live')

Heaven, if you look up, isn’t black as it used to be. Our window is a prayer, and beyond, the line a day makes. We look out one morning into the way of streets, amongst magpie scurf, chasing bird mind.

Each scratch a water history.

The clear could be

what we’re waiting for.

Or we search

for different evidence

equal to

the same odd beauty

that’s more

than distraction.

A canvas of anxiety

inscribes walls

and metal

where birds

and people go over

paving and crossings.

Much is overwritten.

Much disappears in

telling the hours.

window beyond makes scratch

waiting beauty

walls birds over

from Ash is Here, So are Stars, Walleah Press, 2012

Note: ‘Where We Live’, a poem in six sections and containing sections within sections, was first published as a collaborative work with photographer Annette Willis in the anthology, The Material Poem, ed James Stuart, available as a free download. This version omits the visuals (colour photographs) and some explanatory text. Each section of the version in Ash is Here, So are Stars bears a title referring to the accompanying photograph in the original version.

The Green Dress (after ‘Snow White Joins Up’ by Klaus Friedeberger)

The desert erases regard, wind plays on.

A mirror looks back to the future which has no face.

I’m a player for the war outside.

My name has killed me, vaterland, vaster land, no escape.

Do not forsake me!

I’ve become the most beautiful green dress.

Maybe you would not recognise me

when the Johnnies come marching home.

from Fold Unfold, Vagabond Press, 2005 (chapbook)

Note: Klaus Friedeberger was born in Berlin in 1922 and arrived in England aged 16, five months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The following year, along with many German refugees, he was interned and was transferred to Australia aboard the troopship Dunera. He was interned in a camp at Hay in rural NSW. During his two years of internment, Friedeberger produced watercolours and drawings, together with Surrealist-inspired compositions, posters and scenery designs for stage productions in the camp, of which ‘Snow White Joins Up’ is one.

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.

from Screens Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems, Salt Publishing, 2002

When Planets Softly Collide

This is not a poem about dust,

there have been too many of those,

but may be about wind, who knows,

the remaking of deserts, endlessly,

when sand becomes a definition

of scale or boundaries or change

like weather squeezing out lines of heat

that drives from solid midnight freeze

up into the sweat pressure of midday.

These conditions are inescapable, no relief —

still there are flowers, stubborn and pink.

Yesterday, strangely, began with showers,

laying the heat demons down and out

for a moment and the air, wet

with the ghost of something old.

Whispers like clouds of aimless particles

which one day could form something solid,

whispers and the slight reverberation

of planets softly colliding,

showering each other with dust,

which they have been trying to avoid,

hoping for a poem about something greener.

As if rock didn't survive,

and dust didn't dance on air.

from Flagging Down Time, Five Islands Press, 1993

Where The Sea Burns

... et lux perpetua luceat eis ...

No-one dies of the cold here, they say,

and talk instead of fire and smoke,

dragon summer that consumed

matchbox houses, the abandoned village

which flourished once to the north.

Until fish began to die, they say,

all these twisted silver tongues

crying, crawling through shallows,

flapping at last on grey sand.

And you could smell it for miles, some said.

A few survived, dragging for days,

and disappeared into pools and lagoons where

there are lights over water at sunset.

But this is impossible, of course, nothing

lasts, nothing hopes under heat and

nothing ever dies of the cold, they say,

not in places, here and beyond, past

the cliffs to the north where the sea burns.

from The Book of Possibilities, Hale and Iremonger, 1997

Note: The Latin is taken from the Requiem Mass – ‘... and may perpetual light shine on them ...’. 

My source is Mozart’s.