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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

The cover illustration shows a photomicrograph of a sample of red ochre

Contents
1. A vision
2. Colours swim
3. Happiness
4. The heat
5. Doubting sleep
6. Driving night out
7. A telephone, a saxophon
8. Hazed
9. The hushing
10. A Calling

 

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).

You can contact Jill Jones at :
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.