Product Description
Jill Jones is an omnivorous, attentive and exhilarating poet, admired for her seductive hauntings of urban experience and her playful rearrangements
of language and page. Her work over the last three decades has fearlessly reckoned with the body and sexuality, place and the environment, the gamut of everyday life. Now, this long-awaited book showcases Jones’ ambitious and resonant reworkings of the lyric, her dextrous and often witty extensions of experimental modes, her fresh cinematic eye, and her restless inventories of the planet’s current disasters. Gathering work from her 13 previous volumes, plus more than 30 new poems, Acrobat Music is a major recasting of Jones’ distinctive and invigorating contribution to contemporary poetry.
‘A leading contemporary stylist who has disciplined her lyric into a rigorous
and highly economical poetry of description and response.’
— Judges’ comments, 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
‘Jill Jones’s work is characterized by its freshness and its originality, its
sensitivity to almost imperceptible valences of language, experience and
expression.’
— Judges’ comments, 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize
‘Jones is concerned with both the physical material level and the more
subtle levels of feeling and inner consciousness. The breadth of her vision
encompasses the grit and clamour of the streets and neighbourhood, the
traffic of both road and air, the city office block, the life of the home, the
passions of the heart.’
— Judges’ comments, 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize
REVIEWS
“Acrobat Music includes poems from Jones’s thirteen books of poetry published between 1992 and 2020…a fortifying manifesto to her oeuvre, reflecting Jones’s interest in ‘the possibilities of the poem … form, sound, connotation, address’…sentiments emphasise the post-romantic tenor in Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems, most clearly manifested in her preoccupation with ideas of beauty combined with a persistent sense that language alienates writers from a connection to innocence and unmediated experience.”
CASSANDRA ATHERTON, Australian Book Review
“New book by award-winning Adelaide-based poet Jill Jones, who’s widely admired for the diurnal and domestic to matters of the heart and of universal concern…Each page is a revelation of ideas, responses and observations on matters large and small, from ‘deliberations on sudden days of exceptional brightness’, to ‘what the glass holds’…This is a book that has taken me on an enjoyable journey and one that, in turn, I will take on a journey to read again.”
SUSAN KUROSAWA, The Australian
About three-quarters through Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems, Jill Jones nudges the reader knowingly in the ribs. ‘Difficult Poem’ proposes a list of possible definitions of what a ‘difficult poem’ might be, or might be assumed to be. Composed of only six lines, and nineteen words anagrammatically rearranged from its title, with an introductory subtitle, ‘(yeah like a’, it’s an ironic riposte to what has come back to Jones, as she told Jen Webb in a 2019 interview, ‘that my poetry is thought to be a bit “difficult”, for some reason I can’t quite figure out. Because it really isn’t difficult.’ Having read Acrobat Music, I wouldn’t disagree with her.
ANDY JACKSON, Sydney Review of Books
