Sex for Jones holds a special place, mostly a positive one, and comes here in many forms, equally tolerated and usually savoured: the life force of libido that might happily overbrim the cup to spill anarchically in all directions, even in the grimmest of moments: ‘When you were a nurse / A dying old man reached out / His hand (I imagine a claw) / From beneath his sheets / To grip your fingers / … & put them on his stiff cock’ (‘Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life’). Jones states directly that passion should inform poetry, with registers that are ‘hot’ (‘Singing crazy’). In another place he says lovingly: ‘I wish that when you go to meet your life / it will be wonderful & sweet and painful / as lives should be …’ (‘Dear Alyse’.) Gentleness and tender feelings arise quite delicately in some poems, often seeming miraculously, given the inherent harshness and difficulty of human existence, the confronting indifference of reality: after ‘hail had stripped the spring seeds / from the trees & they spilled across the ground’ their husks seem briefly transformed into moonlight: ‘the park sparkled / with laces & rings of light’ (‘Dear Alyse’.)
Jones’s proficiency with the short story and novel are evident in a number of poems: for example, in the beautifully handled narrative shifts of ‘The massage’, which shows under-stated story telling in poetry at its finest; and also in the good natured, whimsical and entertaining ‘The odyssey of the Sydney Opera House’. The poem ‘The kindly ones’ puts the three avenging furies of Greek mythology into koala-motif slippers as the ladies gather for drinks and ice creams, while literally bringing the icy weather of climate change with them.
As part of his considerable range, Jones is not above an occasional foray into the Grand Guignol and the Gothic, as in the deliberately over-heated and over-wrought ‘The flower show’, with its disturbing sub-text of incest and suicide. Then there’s the bleakly over-the-top, fiendish Eucharist of ‘The new tenant’, which has to be read to be (dis)believed. But one always detects a wicked smile behind poems such as these: because what might otherwise shock can really be Jones pushing a form as far as he can, or only just so far, before conceding to ‘taste’ or restraint.
A distinct, though casual pleasure of this collection is its evocation of many places, moods and atmospheres of Sydney and environs … in urban and suburban settings. Another is Jones’s descriptive skill, and allied facility with Australian idiom; never overdone, but employed exactly, and to effect. Here are some typically tangy turns of phrase: of an emerging snail, ‘the shelled labia descends / in slow soft waves’ (‘The snail’); the amusingly personified planet Pluto is ‘A little squirt with a sneer and a razor blade grin’ (‘Blow out’); and the earth has acne: ‘nuclear power plants popping up like zits’ (‘Blow out’); a glass of ice coffee in a girl’s hand is ‘streaked / with ice cream & rimmed with lipstick bows’ (‘Shot’); and in the same poem a new mobile phone is ‘sleek as a mortician’s van’; while in ‘Pig’ the phrase ‘When Bobby chucked a moon / At the school dance …’ wonderfully sets the scene.
The poems are also filled with religious imagery from both Eastern and Western traditions, used by Jones as tropes for emotional or physical intensity and sometimes, in expressionistic moments, for slightly crazy or spun-out states of mind. I don’t think Jones offers the ‘comfort of religion’ here, and his attitude is clear in ‘On the death of poets’, where Heaven is described as a place where poets ‘are scooped into a dazzling orgasm / Of light & live forever within / A television soap powder commercial’. In a related piece, ‘It might be fun to be a dead poet’, Jones anticipates: ‘Scholars could debate the authenticity / Of my handwriting / On the door of the third cubicle / At Wynyard Station’. In ‘The massage’, Jones wishes a merciful death for a drug dealer who will soon be executed by an Indonesia firing squad: ‘… will see the moon as the bullets strike him / so that he may enter that glove of light & it will spread / white & perfect into a beautiful hit of heroin / & he will rise as his body drops into a hole’.
For all Jones’s interest in mysticism, the occult and world religions, you feel he is never, finally, an otherworldly poet. Reality is just too persistent, too much the stone in his shoe: the very material of existence is its ultimate value. In ‘The front window’, the Poet looks out at the world, and applies a mental eraser to all that he sees. An old woman walks past, and he mentally erases her from existence, but the parcel she carries drops and releases a swarm of bees. He rubs them out one by one, but the bees ‘are a plague’ and, do what he might, ‘they beat against the glass & live’. Reality simply won’t go away. The point is made with even more finality in ‘Poems to my father’. He remembers gardening with his dad: ‘when I was a child … / I asked you … what happened to people / after they die but you did not look up / just paused & offered the face / of the shovel to me / there were little pyramids of dung / a few slices of decomposing onion / the hard stone of a fruit / beginning to split with the raw seed / white & soft breaking through it / & the tail of an earthworm / slowly moving into a clod of earth …’ The Jones lotus, his sparkling flower brain, has roots probing deep in the mud.
It’s no surprise, considering his political activism, that Jones also has one ear attuned to what he describes, in ‘A brick & sandstone ymca’, as ‘the fractured poetry / Of commerce and power’. In ‘Moby Dick’, the poet comments on Melville’s novel, and its author: ‘foreseeing the self-regarding drama / Of the Republic … // In the company of a divided Satanic hero / Who will appear in many disguises, on a million screens / A two gun emperor of light & suffering / Dominating the world with heroism & doubt …’ Jones suggests how, all too easily, the mistakes of history dissolve into the amnesiac froth of fashion and nostalgia, as in ‘Cage music’, when ‘In the next room, / a man with a nasal paunch / discusses through the radio / the Vietnam war / as though it all happened / at a rock festival on the Isle of Wight …’ Later in the same poem ‘When the doorbell rings / … I tell the two Asio men in suits / no I don’t feel the need / for tuition on the bible …’
Perhaps echoing Mao’s dictum that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Jones declares in the concluding stanza to ‘Voyage to Sebaldia’: ‘Harris Goring Himmler Le May, the men of fire, / Sit in the seats before us & point through the smoky present / To discuss the landscape. So little has changed. // They know who they are & where they came from / & they are in love with their destination.’ Jayne Fenton-Keane comments on ‘Voyage to Sebaldia’ in Australian Poetry: Reflections on Nature, Space and Identity (2010) in these terms: ‘(It) is written in response to the works of W.G. Sebald … (whose) works are a dreamlike amalgam of poetry, essay and novel. Superficially they inhabit the Europe of the late 20th century. (Sebald’s) is a diffuse landscape where identity is continually lost in history, archaeology, artefact and porous meaning. Such exquisite writing, permeated by the impact of carnage on generations who were not present, and are compelled to find themselves through it! In this way, it is a separate country, but one more and more people may come to inhabit.’
There are many poems in this collection with themes of paranoia and surveillance, of being secretly watched, tracked and traced; sometimes just by neighbours, or debt collectors. More worryingly, these might herald the immanent enforcement of Orwellian 1984-like dystopias at the hands of unelected and unaccountable forces, whether of the right or left. But Jones clearly distinguishes the boundaries between the paranoiac/delusional and the possible. ‘The new neighbours’ is clearly in the former category: a homophobic religious fanatic believes he is able to detonate explosives – but, literally, just by sheer spark of faith alone! – which he has secreted outside the house of his new, gay neighbours.
Finally, we have the chillingly prescient poem ‘The last days of the republic’ from Jones’s 2008 collection, Blow Out. In this poem the power of new technology is frighteningly adumbrated: ‘There is a woman standing outside a post office / In Asia with a baby in a pram full of explosives / & this is a problem but the companies we have tendered / Are working on an anti-terrorism laser lens / To vaporise the difficulty cleanly / Via satellite, without a trace.’ Another jaundiced nod to the future is offered in ‘A Brick & sandstone ymca’ where the Sydney monorail, suspended above the poet’s head, ‘Slides pneumatically / Into the future / Gripping a single greasy rail.’ Passing time also figures in ‘Reading poetry on facebook’, which Jones describes as ‘like wearing a condom on my eyeballs’. He nods with amused despair at his library shelves: ‘my old yellow / Waste Land & I want to crawl / in between its Faber cardboard // all fusty & dusty & modernist …’ The fate of our bright and shining things is ever thus, and shared with failing eyesight: ‘all it takes, my dear, is time / & that glow leaking through a screen’.
What I most like about this collection – and there is much to like – is how it conveys the actual feel and fabric of a life communicated candidly from within that life, rather than from the outside, and with an overwhelming sense of credibility, yet balanced by a knowing, and modest, literary intelligence. There is great honesty, even when the imagination soars and plummets like a giddy kite in the wind, and its contradictions and delights are welded into the troubling, confronting, energising dimensions of these poems. Finally, if ever Australian poetry becomes too gentrified, too decorous or anaemic, too merely fashionable, subservient to academicism or set to theorise itself out of existence, we always have Jones as a reality check, with his corrosive, cordial despair to help keep us honest and put a measure of coughed up grit and flammable venom back into the mix; paradoxically, to keep our spirits up.
