Customer Reviews

The Blessing: New & Selected Poems

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THE BLESSING, by Richard Jones, is truly a blessing for those of us who read poetry to be touched. Jones is a lyric poet who speaks from and to the heart in poems of love and grief and endless wonder. This directness is countered by persona poems, character sketches and portraits, and wildly imaginative narratives, all of which still go to the heart of something wondrous or mysterious about the world and, especially, the human spirit.

THE BLESSING collects Jones's earlier books, COUNTRY OF AIR, AT LAST WE ENTER PARADISE, and A PERFECT TIME, as well as many new and previously uncollected poems. It also contains 48 QUESTIONS, a delightfully indirect set of a sonnet-like answers to an interviewer's questions, excerpts of which aired on NPR. Jones teaches English and creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he also edits the independent poetry journal, POETRY EAST, which moved to the midwest with him from the east and which is soon to have a new incarnation as POETRY EAST OF EDEN.

My college students respond particularly well to Jones's moving accounts of the death of his nephew Andrew, in poems that teach us not only the reality of loss but the miracle of acceptance. (If you like these, you will also like THE ANDREW POEMS, by Shelly Wagner, Jones's sister, also available at amazon.com.) My students also appreciate Jones's straight-on look at dysfunctional family life (redeemed by love), youthful alcoholism, and alienation. The marvelous thing is that Jones's poems do not judge--they simply recreate or reveal the range of human feelings. And very often these poems guide us back from the depths of suffering to a transformed state. In his own words: "Do you know what I think, / drifting off toward dawn? / If, in the garden of the world, / there's such a thing as suffering, / I have never suffered."

While I have had great success teaching these emotionally accessible poems, I also turn to THE BLESSING for private pleasure, seeking wisdom, delight, redemptive tears, miracle. The poems in THE BLESSING describe an arc. They move from sorrow to acceptance, from the visible to the invisible and back, from seeking to finding peace in the world we are given to live in and discover as a paradise, after all.

The Blessing gathers under one cover Richard Jones' insightfully candid and supremely accessible poetry providing a comprehensive overview survey of this superb and uniquely talented poet. Things: I got to a dimly lit secondhand store/to lift empty champagne glasses/and open dusty drawers./I buy the broken chair/and dedicate myself/to its new life./I leave with the chipped vase,/the cracked violin, the yellowed lace.//I go to bright department stores/where aisles of merchandise/sing their songs/beneath fluorescent lights --/ desks, sofas, picture frames,/asking for a reason to exist,/demanding our secrets, our love,/every thing demanding/everything of my life.

I love the work of Richard Jones so much that I used a portion of his piece "White Towel" in my upcoming book "More than a Memory." Jones' work relies on observation and well placed words over pretense. If you enjoy good poetry, you will treasure "The Blessing" by Richard Jones.

These poems sound like poorly crafted journal entries. The poem Rapture is a terribly conceived (and awkwardly written) direct "steal" from an old Buddhist story.

Yesterday, (June 11, 2000) I was fortunate to attend an afternoon poetry reading at Beyond Baroque, in Santa Monica, CA, where Richard Jones read from this, his newest book. Nothing beats hearing a poet read what he/she has written. While I was sitting, waiting for the reading to begin, I leafed through this volume and run across the poem "Golf Towels." Jones coincidentally included this poem in his reading.

He described his father's fascination for discarded golf towels. His father was at one time an airline pilot (impetus for Jones' book "Country of Air"), dissatisfied with his career. Now, as golf course "Marshall" for his local course, Jones' father gets great satisfaction in retrieving all sorts of discarded golf paraphernalia (some by the marshy paths, some in the trash bins), especially golf towels. After Jones read this poem, which included references to four different males named "Andrew" in his family, I later made the connection of a fifth "Andrew" in the poem, the golf towel from St. Andrews golf course in Scotland. This light blue towel, with a gold crown in the center, was wrapped around Richard's baby son (Andrew), fresh from a bath, and who was then handed to his grandfather's arms. (The poem says it so much more eloquently than I can describe it here.)

Besides publishing Jones' newest poems, "The Blessing" is a collection of four of his earlier books of poetry, which had been of print. Not only is it a blessing to read Richard Jones' newest works, but it is a blessing to once again have in print his older, equally powerful works, taking measure of the progress of his life.

An old literature professor of mine once joked that the hardest part of being a poet is convincing other people that your work is in fact poetry. if that's true, then Richard Jones must be the hardest working man in American literature! I know you don't necessarily have to be good to be published, so I'm not surprised that he has a book out, but I am surprised at how many positive reviews he has gotten here (although a couple reviewers are pretty clearly friends). As I read through as many of these poems as I could, I couldn't help thinking that I'd read them all before -- or ones like them, most likely on a greeting card or in a cheesy book of inspiration. If you're not a real poetry fan and are just looking for a light dispensible read, then this might be right up your alley. But if you really are interested in poetry you'd be better off with the likes of Heaney, Pinskey, olds, etc. And for those of you who gave this book a high rating, ask yourself this: How much of what you read do you actually remmeber? what has stayed with you longer that a few fleeting moments? Where is the value in poetry that has meaning only for as long as it takes to turn the page... or, better yet, to close the book?