There’s a sense that the young and old will always be at odds, as time takes its toll and separates generations. This theme, which unites a number of poems, is taken up in a more resigned register in ‘Eyepod’, when, from the back of a bus, ‘a grey man with smeared eyes’ watches a young girl dance joyfully on the footpath, only for the watcher to drop his head and confront ‘liver spots on the back / of his hand.’ The weary watcher knows that, whatever you say about the young, only one thing is certain: that they will grow out of it.
Jones is now a community leader and dedicated family man, as well as one of our leading poets, but to his credit has never been tempted to sit back and spin his work as a cake walk from mean streets to suburban idyll. His glance is too penetrating, and too complex, for any sort of sugar coating.
There are several outstanding ‘portrait poems’ in this collection. These are intended to resist reader complacency. They include the disturbing ‘The generator’, which recounts the delirious antics of a damaged friend, entirely off the rails and quite doomed, he had:
a Volkswagen fitted with a siren … he hated the public at seventeen was sure life was barren … sold his arse at Green Park although he didn’t need the money picked up by a fat man he found the ultimate in kicks when he attached little plates to the guy’s scrotum & turned a generator giving genuine electric shocks …
Eventually, the friend has a breakdown. One night, ‘he kissed me got into the Volkswagen / dropped the clutch / started the siren & as he accelerated / filled the night air with flame / crossed the arc & / burned straight out towards the gap’. As most Sydney people will know, ‘the gap’ is the famous suicide leap near Watson’s Bay.
There is something more than cautionary about this poem. One suspects there was a time Jones himself risked self-immolation, being consumed by his own demons and despair. In ‘The coronation’, he describes the gnawing sick panic he feels confronting a female version of himself (the name Rae might be a clue) in a moonlit ‘small square park’, where rats pick at a discarded lunch wrap in the grass and his head is ‘crowned’ by an aureole of overhead lights: ‘(as) … her long hair brushes the side of my / cheek the breeze of a razor … // … I want to die / in the corner the rat picks / into the soft core of a sandwich / I tremble like dry paper …’ As this example suggests, Jones is able to keep the confessional mode fresh and serviceable. In tandem with his polished take on realism, it makes a much more subtle and multi-dimensional vehicle by avoiding the trap of extreme subjectivism and infantile solipsism – fully aware of how a ‘chip-on-the shoulder’ victim stance can become knee-jerk or automatic, usually to the poem’s cost, or lead to a me-centred void.
‘The mudra of the rose’, from his second book, The Mad Vibe, makes that void an actual place. He employs the motif of a flower, a recurring one: a rose which encloses the mystery of self is a trope for an endlessly self-mirroring, in-turned emotional orgasm:
your eyeballs burn back into you like small black suns creating a paper apocalypse of your memories as they burn when you are scoured clear of memory and sensation when you no longer love & the air is utterly dry shut in the rose of empty air your belly lifting and twisting in the fluid probing of fire then the petals will close …
In this seductive void, life and death fuse together in a sort of timeless, suspended fake Samadhi, with everything combined into a longed-for and seductive finality. But this place is finally revealed as claustrophobic, freedom-robbing and absurd as, ‘deep in this blackness // … you might hear … / the sound of something scratching / with dry claws on rock / or a damp match on a box’. The fire and flux of another sort of orgasmic vaporisation is alluded to in ‘Blast furnace’, which tells of a real death which the poet witnessed while working in a steel foundry in Whyalla: ‘… when a man in khaki overalls slipped and fell in a slow arc, / left hand grabbing air. // nothing – / a scream & a smear of opaque oil – / nobody knew him so nothing happened / because there wasn’t anything to bury or remember’ (‘Blast furnace’).
In a thematically related poem, ‘The marigolds’, a poet imaginatively enters some flowers he sees ‘even spaced … / in the chilled // May sunlight’; and his hands ‘cupped their doomed / little buds …’ In this poem Jones suggests that the poet, to understand anything fully, must develop an empathy so intense that he becomes the doomed flower:
your throat its stem felt the sap push up through your belly prising your neck back you looked into the Sun your marigold body stem flower pollen & face yearned into its great mirror & somewhere in the vast rippling centre in those massive shifting caverns of gas you saw the marvellous symmetry of the marigolds.
As in other poems in this volume, the microscopic and macroscopic are made to fuse. In ‘Strathfield Street’, for instance, the world’s vastness may be seen in miniature, as something compromised and mean, simply reflected in a drop of rain: ‘on a leaf of oleander the world / condenses into a delicate / & ugly flower’. In ‘The marigolds’ this apotheosis is also disturbing because it carries the knowledge – or stark self-realisation – that embodied being is entirely physical, and thus that every living thing is earmarked for death and decay – always ‘caught in the body / the uncomfortable damp layers of it’ (‘The pier’).
The planetary theme, the fusing of micro- and macroscopic vision, is taken up again in a later poem, ‘On the day Neil Armstrong died’: ‘I sat on a patient sandstone rock / … in my rebellious backyard // Corridors of light opened and closed / As the trees along the fence shuffled & shifted … // A waxing gibbous moon / Watched me with her big stone eye / With the courteous gravity of quiet dust.’ Human beings may ultimately be cosmic in origin – along with all other living things, and equally miraculous, and to be valued – but they can also seem quite unlikely in the scheme of things and, in a perhaps more hard-nosed sense, even slightly absurd. Particularly when viewed en masse, humans are nothing to write home about: ‘our vulgar growth: / Millions of us, wriggling & squirming, / Worms eating into the carcass // Of this tiny ball of mud & fire …’ (‘Letter to Denmark’). All life, then, is precarious and fragile, Taking this fact into account, by a circular emotional logic we return to Jones’s poems of gritty realism, though now within a much expanded understanding and imaginative context.
Another way Jones renovates the confessional mode is by bringing seemingly contradictory material into play, or by fusing the confessional with the expressionistic: his work can be simultaneously honest, intelligent, insolent, sordid, sensitive, subtle, hilarious, tactful, intense, ironic, tender, surprising, highly imaginative, formally innovative (often very), brutally simple and direct, sympathetic, realistic, whimsical, compassionate, mischievous. One of this poet’s key abilities is to fuse the extraordinary with the ordinary, the banal with the remarkable, and transform opposites into each other: the dirt and despair of life into a sense of the transcendent, and vice versa:
down under the bridge you … took your coat off beside the pylon & rested back while in the deeper grass an old man coughed you were open & thick as an apricot overripe with blood in the city huge pillars of light burned the ancient corpse of God & the empty ferris wheel creaked & worked its hooks into the eyeball of the clouds (‘Shakti’).
