The Beautiful Anxiety

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' expand into 'something planetary'. Sensate poesis unfolds 'genres of dust'; the ghosts of Voss, Sappho and Messaien appear. 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: '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 Jill Jones was born in Sydney and currently lives in Adelaide. Previous books have won both the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Mary Gilmore Award. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.