Description
Product Description
On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as "a brand-new world-class poet." This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.
Amazon.com Review
Rodney Jones' poems will capture you first by their humor and familiarity--on a second reading their deeper significance will begin to sink in. Their meaning is sparked in quick bites and tied together with a vital energy, creating scenes that are familiar, yet which always manage to invoke new shades of perception. Not content with a simply visual awareness, Jones takes the reader to a place where intuition can flourish. A ramble through this winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry is sure to provoke a second reading--silent or aloud.
From Library Journal
This is a rich, personal, and complex book that draws on the full powers of memory and imagination. Jones writes beautifully about the epiphanies of childhood and adolescence, the girl who attacked him with "a number 2 Eagle pencil," the tragic car wreck remembered as the "windshield's splintering lens," and the sexual initiations involving "fishy condoms." Other poems are quite topical and contemporary, including those on oil spills, graffiti, shopping malls, and the Challenger disaster. The best poems, however, are the purely imaginary efforts, where Jones writes in an absolutely personal idiom, as in "Pastoral for Derrida." In that poem--and in the book as a whole--he explores the dialectic of language and silence, making memorable art from "the ore of words." Highly recommended for collections emphasizing poetry.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Academic Subjects
A Blasphemy
Burnt Oil And Hawk
Carpe Diem
Caught
Dangers
Every Day There Are New Memos
An Explanation Of The Exhibit
The Foolishness
In Manufacturing
Just So
The Kitchen Gods
Last Night Among The Very Young
Life Of Sundays
Mimosa
Mule
My Manhood
News Of The Cranes
On The Bearing Of Waitresses
One Of The Citizens
Pastoral For Derrida
Pure Mathematics
Pussy
The Sadness Of Early Afternoons
Serious Partying
The Weepers
Who Runs The Country
Winter Retreat: Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr.
--
Table of Poems from
Jones' poems cannot be absorbed in a single reading; but amply reward prolonged scrutiny. --
Publishers Weekly
On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as "a brand-new world-class poet." This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.
Amazon.com Review
Rodney Jones' poems will capture you first by their humor and familiarity--on a second reading their deeper significance will begin to sink in. Their meaning is sparked in quick bites and tied together with a vital energy, creating scenes that are familiar, yet which always manage to invoke new shades of perception. Not content with a simply visual awareness, Jones takes the reader to a place where intuition can flourish. A ramble through this winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry is sure to provoke a second reading--silent or aloud.
From Library Journal
This is a rich, personal, and complex book that draws on the full powers of memory and imagination. Jones writes beautifully about the epiphanies of childhood and adolescence, the girl who attacked him with "a number 2 Eagle pencil," the tragic car wreck remembered as the "windshield's splintering lens," and the sexual initiations involving "fishy condoms." Other poems are quite topical and contemporary, including those on oil spills, graffiti, shopping malls, and the Challenger disaster. The best poems, however, are the purely imaginary efforts, where Jones writes in an absolutely personal idiom, as in "Pastoral for Derrida." In that poem--and in the book as a whole--he explores the dialectic of language and silence, making memorable art from "the ore of words." Highly recommended for collections emphasizing poetry.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Academic Subjects
A Blasphemy
Burnt Oil And Hawk
Carpe Diem
Caught
Dangers
Every Day There Are New Memos
An Explanation Of The Exhibit
The Foolishness
In Manufacturing
Just So
The Kitchen Gods
Last Night Among The Very Young
Life Of Sundays
Mimosa
Mule
My Manhood
News Of The Cranes
On The Bearing Of Waitresses
One Of The Citizens
Pastoral For Derrida
Pure Mathematics
Pussy
The Sadness Of Early Afternoons
Serious Partying
The Weepers
Who Runs The Country
Winter Retreat: Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr.
--
Table of Poems from
Jones' poems cannot be absorbed in a single reading; but amply reward prolonged scrutiny. --
Publishers Weekly
