New book: The Beautiful Anxiety
Early next year (though it is out and about now) I publish my 8th full-length book, The Beautiful Anxiety.
As the back cover says:
As well as being a work focused on the material, it is, in an odd way, a metaphysical work. I know that one is not allowed to talk in such terms these days but I've never been one for doing what I'm supposed to do. I've also taken a chance on using the word 'beautiful' in the title, for which I also expect to be castigated by the poetry and theory police. If one has always been a maverick, one may as well continue being so. No matter. I presume readers see past all that burble and will make up their own minds about it, and, I hope, some will like it. It's been a book long in the making; a few poems were published almost a decade ago. On the other hand, a few poems were written late last year or early this year.
And some readers have made some kind comments on the book:
“This is surely a break-through book. Jill Jones has compressed her lyric awareness into an exacting and low-key brilliance: alert, astute, unsentimental, and with a linguistic intelligence so sharp in its inner and outer registers I kept asking myself: how is she doing it? There is incisive balance between the sensory and the fugitive, yet her images and figures are so crisp they feel more real than so-called reality.”—Philip Salom
“Jill Jones’ The Beautiful Anxiety, dedicated to the memory of her mother, joins elegiac witness to ‘another flow’. Her sparse, 'ruined lyrics', 'barely words', expand into 'something planetary': 'figures/atoms/curves/droplets'. Sensate poesis unfolds 'genres of dust', 'the clash of pasts'. With Jones as our guide, we search 'the ephemeral world' for a 'green name': 'awakened/again we walk in the depth/of field'. The ghosts of Voss and Messiaen appear; 'a fragment from a fragment of Sappho' brings 'possibles, rain on earth'. Dreams, signs and portents are 'not like your mother/said'. The Beautiful Anxiety dwells in the imminence of loss, its 'vast frontier' and scope. And if you think the work of mourning is done, 'Urn' replies, 'I don't know/where to put you': 'Never end, never end'. As Jones writes in 'What's Coming Next': 'All bets are off./You have to go through it'. You do, and you'll be glad you did .”—Kate Lilley
“Jill Jones’ poetry attains a Newtonian clarity by occasioning objects to collide with displaced emotion, breaking new ground through the estranging effect of coupling wonder with wryness. This book is an intense celebration of that subcutaneous disturbance often only present in the most acute poetic sensibilities.”—Brian Castro
My thanks to David Musgrave and the team at Puncher & Wattmann for taking it on and making a beautiful space for the words.
As the back cover says:
The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the 21st century. The poems are in turn provocative, tender, impatient, playful, and swerve through the world, awake to its lostness as well as its ‘flesh and spark’.
As well as being a work focused on the material, it is, in an odd way, a metaphysical work. I know that one is not allowed to talk in such terms these days but I've never been one for doing what I'm supposed to do. I've also taken a chance on using the word 'beautiful' in the title, for which I also expect to be castigated by the poetry and theory police. If one has always been a maverick, one may as well continue being so. No matter. I presume readers see past all that burble and will make up their own minds about it, and, I hope, some will like it. It's been a book long in the making; a few poems were published almost a decade ago. On the other hand, a few poems were written late last year or early this year.
And some readers have made some kind comments on the book:
“This is surely a break-through book. Jill Jones has compressed her lyric awareness into an exacting and low-key brilliance: alert, astute, unsentimental, and with a linguistic intelligence so sharp in its inner and outer registers I kept asking myself: how is she doing it? There is incisive balance between the sensory and the fugitive, yet her images and figures are so crisp they feel more real than so-called reality.”—Philip Salom
“Jill Jones’ The Beautiful Anxiety, dedicated to the memory of her mother, joins elegiac witness to ‘another flow’. Her sparse, 'ruined lyrics', 'barely words', expand into 'something planetary': 'figures/atoms/curves/droplets'. Sensate poesis unfolds 'genres of dust', 'the clash of pasts'. With Jones as our guide, we search 'the ephemeral world' for a 'green name': 'awakened/again we walk in the depth/of field'. The ghosts of Voss and Messiaen appear; 'a fragment from a fragment of Sappho' brings 'possibles, rain on earth'. Dreams, signs and portents are 'not like your mother/said'. The Beautiful Anxiety dwells in the imminence of loss, its 'vast frontier' and scope. And if you think the work of mourning is done, 'Urn' replies, 'I don't know/where to put you': 'Never end, never end'. As Jones writes in 'What's Coming Next': 'All bets are off./You have to go through it'. You do, and you'll be glad you did .”—Kate Lilley
“Jill Jones’ poetry attains a Newtonian clarity by occasioning objects to collide with displaced emotion, breaking new ground through the estranging effect of coupling wonder with wryness. This book is an intense celebration of that subcutaneous disturbance often only present in the most acute poetic sensibilities.”—Brian Castro
My thanks to David Musgrave and the team at Puncher & Wattmann for taking it on and making a beautiful space for the words.
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