Rodney Jones, new entry, by Barry Goldensohn

Rodney Jones' poems are anchored in the rural South, but they are the work of the smart kid who left for the big world. A number of his poems are full of a deep respect for the poor of both races struggling in their world, and he feels no need to make their dignity mythic or aristocratic. There are many poems of the wiseguy, failure, lover, father, striver, goofball, earnest student, professor, artist, and horny hippie kid. The range is impressive. His irony is habitual, stemming from a delightful sense of the absurd, with high-handed comic riffs, and it serves as a corrective to the sentiment of his elegiac sensibility.

His first book, The Story They Told Us of Light, was chosen by Elizabeth Bishop for the Associated Writing Programs Award Series. Although many of its poems are marred by the fashionable surrealism of the seventies, his future strengths are apparent. While some poets, like Donne, begin poems with extravagant gestures, Jones has a characteristic intellectual and emotional leap at the end of his poems, where he flings himself into the search for meaning.

But how shyly

you bowed your head. You knew

why dogs and kisses went for the throat. ("Adam's Apple")

And:

But who will look the right way now

out of such a past? If I remember:

the last prayer was to be made whole;

the first was to be beautiful. ("Goiter")

And:

You wanted to see her, to know where it was,

You wanted the camera inside the heart. ("for adults only")

The power of the last example is that it puts the camera where it belongs, and not inside the cunt where the pornographic imagination appears to want it. The poem surprises us with what first seems to be only an ordinary sentiment--this is not an easy trick. It also points to the central theme of the book, put in "Micro Journey" as "Trying to get inside." Here, the phrase refers to women, the heart, the place, the culture, the mind.

Jones' following two books, The Unborn and Transparent Gestures, continue and refine the characteristic flinging of himself out at the end of his poems, toward meaning. Other poets do this, but unlike Philip Levine's practice, for example, where the poem rises from a flat style to eloquence, Jones' poems simply intensify an eloquence sustained throughout. His later style, freed of affectation, is strongly marked by intense eloquence: Jones echoes Dylan Thomas ("the field mouse/ turned back from the least kernel of the spindliest cob") or Hart Crane ("floating altars in the synagogues of the hummingbirds") or Walt Whitman, with long lines in an elegiac mood. However, unlike Crane or Thomas, he is never unclear. His syntax has the urgency of passionate speech that needs to make itself understood. And unlike Whitman, his music derives not from the recirculations and repeats of parallel structures and incantatory drumming syntax, but from the forward movement of complex, far-reaching, inclusive sentences, driving to an urgent conclusion.

These two books move toward an aphoristic clarity and his work gets more analytic and elegiac at the same time. He is a smart observer of cultural and intellectual mores. "Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr." offers a grimly comic vision of a polite conference in praise of politically correct goals as a failure of vision. It should become a classic of its kind, with its companion piece, "Pussy"--a venture into political incorrectness.

The fourth book, Apocalyptic Narrative, playing against its title, is a cycle of praise, even in the title poem, about the love of apocalypse that we manage to survive with our more mundane calls to faith and love. The book is filled with elegies for the dying balanced against his son's birth. The praise we find here is not the less passionate for being full of sharp discriminations.

Up here in the unforgivable amnesia of libraries,

Where many poems lie dying of first-person omniscience,

The footnotes are doing their effete dance, as always. ("The Work of Poets")

The poems are more inclusive in this book: themes are amplified with variations, the meaning of clothes widely illustrated, the notion of apocalypse run through political, erotic, military changes, and so forth. To this end, Jones' long sentences, driving toward an ample notion of meaning--not to simplicity but to complexity and abundance--serve their subjects brilliantly. The ordering mind is passionately engaged here, even in its memorable cpmedy. There is a serious pursuit of wisdom in this richly musical poetry.