Volume 3, No. 3 November 15, 2002
Jonesing for a little Jones A Review By Angela Merta "Reading Rodney Jones is like drinking a cold beer on a hot day with the smartest redneck in the world." Or so says Houghton Mifflin editor Scott Jones. I tend to agree. I first happened upon one of his books while sitting on a stack of old magazines in the back room of a used bookstore in St. Paul, Minn. Even then, as a young undergraduate attempting to write, I knew I’d found what Czeslaw Milosz might call "a luminous thing." His poems led me out of a puritanical wintry present and into a realm where the lull of history, our sense of truth and fabrication, becomes as variegated as light diminishing on a red-clay rural road. The poem "The Bridge" prompted a gasp loud enough for one young man to look up from his dusty selection with an amused glance. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve read that poem maybe 20 times since then, and I’m still drawn into Jones’ distinctive slow Southern lilting, the twisting narrative that translates memory into imaginative experience. That snowy December afternoon I entered the foreign, and what seemed to me, extremely green and exotic otherland of the American South where a man, Arthur Peavahouse, might jump out of rigid memory and into a roiling river to save the lives trapped inside a sinking automobile. Rodney Jones was born in 1950 and grew up in the farming community of Falkville, Ala. He writes with searing honesty about a wide variety of subjects: the drudgery of blue-collar jobs, the mysticism of childhood memories and the politics of academia (Jones is a professor at the University of Southern Illinois). Always he paints his subjects with an unembarrassed clarity. In the poem "On the Bearing of Waitresses," which appears in his third book, "Transparent Gestures," he imagines the hidden family life of the trailer park: the yard of bricked-in violets, the younger sister pregnant and petulant at her manicure, the mother with her white Bible, the father sullen in his corner. The rural south, not surprisingly, figures prominently both as literal landscape and as metaphor in his poetry. Jones savors the natural world, the power of oral history, and the confused tangle of reinventing experience. He writes richly musical poetry about the sights and sounds of the Southern experience. Consistently, his is eminently readable poetry. Here is a poetic voice that provides a worthy successor to Faulkner, Twain, Welty and O’Connor. Jones is the author of seven books of poetry. The most recent of which, "Kingdom of the Instant," was published in September and amplifies the emotional and stylistic range that brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Award. The Georgia Poetry Circuit and SCAD are sponsoring a reading by Rodney Jones Nov. 15 at 7 p.m. in Red Gallery, 201 E. Broughton St. Jones’ book is available in Ex Libris, 228 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Merta is a liberal arts professor.
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