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14x21 cm, 24
pages, 250 gsm "White" Strata card cover with colour illustration, black
endpapers, hand sewn with navy twist.
ISBN 1 903090 40 7 Ordering Information Contents
Click here to see Peter Minter's review in Jacket
27. Click here to see Maria Christoforo's review in Cordite. See below for a biographical note and extracts from Struggle and radiance. |
Biographical Note.
Jill Jones is a poet and writer who lives in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been widely published in most of the leading literary periodicals in Australia as well as in a number of print and online magazines in New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Britain and India. In 1993 she won the Mary Gilmore Award for her first book of poetry, The Mask and the Jagged Star (Hazard Press). Her second book, Flagging Down Time, was published in late 1993 by Five Islands Press. Her third book, The Book of Possibilities (Hale & Iremonger), was published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the National Book Council 'Banjo' Awards, The Age Poetry Book of the Year award, and the Adelaide Festival Awards. Her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, was published by Salt Publishing 2002. It won the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize (NSW Premier's Literary Awards). She was a co-founder, with Laurin McKinnon, of BlackWattle Press, and she co-edited (with Judith Beveridge and Louise Wakeling) A Parachute of Blue, an anthology of recent Australian poetry (Round Table Publications, 1995).
jpjones at ihug dot com dot au
from Struggle and radiance: ten commentaries
IV. The heat A bee visits each dropped flower. That struggle that line it makes. Nothing knows of the hour that ticks that counts on human mistakes. Purple crushed on bricks and the stairs. Here it starts to brown. And heat is sweet for insects at the bottlebrush. But black over the tongue. No understanding as if we did not dare - standing here - surrender. The sky's blue gapes radiant drops gold through branches. The heat is all over skin and ground and fire somewhere this planet … And you smell it hair burning great coats aflame. VII. A telephone, a saxophone Forgetting how scared to sleep - which is no explanation no matter how elegant or indirect. Belonging with the night the dark chatter of which the street is unaware. What goes on is not forever. Who is on the phone? Is it history some kind of novel? Anyway - a decision! Communists, Zionists Jacobites, Chiliasts. They are now no more mysterious than a door knock a coup daughters of democrats farmers and bankers. Still, I don't belong here even if I do everyone in hell agrees. When the apartment block shakes you know it's for real and life begins despite the facts a transitional stage an after-dinner proposal a departure. Like a moon and saxophone candles and figures at bright cymbals and drums fragile religions still strumming faster than the holy carried away by the absolute a fury of faith in love letters gripped by the jaws of dogma a weak heart muscle a soft sullen beat from the radio upstairs. A star fallen past your window into the alley. And nothing else? Whatever turns out winter skims the river of sunlight summer fakes its tan. Debates and monuments cities unconcerned they pass into you almost, like a refuge where you listen.