A southerner teaching in the cold North (Univ. of So. Illinois),
Jones clings to his good-old-boy roots in this sixth collection: a
big volume of mostly blank verse so expansive in its gestures that
Jones doesn't seem to know what's expendable. Certainly, the grumpy
poems about poetry readings, the rants against lit-crit and
academic egoists, and the AA tales that further support his boasts
of authenticity-he's worked with "the tongue-tied, the murderous,
the illiterate / and the alcoholic," all of whom validate his
present-day plain-speaking common sense, or so he would have us
believe. Jones praises liberally: his penis, the focus of his
religion ("Sacrament for My Penis"); himself, a regular guy doing
laundry ("Doing Laundry"); Isaac B. Singer, for "the courage to be
simple and precise" ("The Limousine . . ."); William Matthews for
his "blues grace" ("The Secret ... ); and his daughter for digging
a ditch on her college break ("For Alexis"). Jones is at his best
in Dixie, remembering his high-school football team ("Natural
Selection"); the communal tonic of music in the South ("One
Music"); and the "hick Zen" of Alabama, where "Down-home trust
rhymes first with lust." The title sequence, a wonderful compendium
of southern-inflected quotations and anecdotes, mixes a profile of
Big Jim Folsom, a recording of Faulkner, a sketch of Nashville as a
world mecca; his mother's varied diction; and his own memories of
shame at his accent: "the raw carcass / of the mispronounced."
Despite himself, a tighter poet than his hero Whitman: Jones lacks
the room to roam and yawp, though he's always eminently readable.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Exulting in the speech of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones's new poems combine satire and ode, formal lament and ribald joke. James Dickey praised this poet's early work as "one of our most poignant and inescapable renditions of the agony at the historical razor's edge." Now, in his sixth book, Jones extends his emotional and stylistic range. He writes of football and feminism, of DDT and family, of crows and sex, of ink and raccoons and perpetual-motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it.
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