Martin Malone
‘It’s a matter of where you tread…’
At a time when poetry is hip again and neat little reputations can be carved out with relative ease for the driven but essentially mediocre talent, it is curiously refreshing that Cumbria’s own multi-garlanded Terry Jones is not a man to publish before he is good and ready.
And good he certainly is: the poetry here is never less than assured, confident and dexterous in execution. Furious Resonance is shot through with the ‘wow’ moments that are essential to good collections and one can see exactly why Terry’s stock is so high with competition judges and editors of serious poetry magazines; for he is a seriously-gifted poet.
He does not shy away from tackling some of the big themes: mortality (‘Spuds’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Archaeopteryx’), the sometimes brutal struggle for existence (‘Formicidae’, ‘Christmas Turkey’) and the role and limitations of language itself (‘Sleep-Talking’, ‘Spinning, ‘A Posy for Heidegger’). All of these are handled with an impressive control over voice and form, and even when the poems clunk a little, it is the quality of mind-in-effort that remains attractive throughout.
At his best, Jones has a metaphysical wit that allows for occasionally breath-taking leaps of associative power: the burning of old dictionaries in ‘Preservations’ becomes a communal act of primal renewal, taking in the atavistic force of poetry and the imagination itself; as the pages ‘buckled like breath’ and the smoke is ‘hanging undecided on its next mutation / before turning to a dark wing’. The same metaphysical micro-to-macro focus is pulled in the wonderful fourteen-line ‘Formicidae’, when, as flies to wanton boys, battling ants are viewed from the Olympian heights of emotionally limited children, ‘Marvelling like gods’.
Elsewhere he is dexterously riffing on single details, exploring their poetic possibilities with a keen eye; as with a lover’s dropped black cardigan in ‘Arrangment’ or the moth squashed between the pages of a re-opened book in a poem of that name. In ‘Kleopatra: Room 62′, Jones marries a resonant central image to a surgical precision of detail that is literally enacted with his description of the mummification process.
Present and absent, I watched the preparation,
all its careful, careless holy butchery:
my hooked womb and brain flung in a bucket,
clots of mud in my little belly,
‘A Posy for Heidegger’ is neatly structured and executed, full of oblique possibilities and implicit relationships with its imagined addressee. In the sonnet ‘Black Rose of Yorkshire’ he displays his technical gifts; making good of half-rhyme and anaphora to maintain a light-touch sense of closed form. In poems like this he displays a questing, restless intelligence constantly inquiring of the world around him, ascertaining some sense of an unintelligible idiom in which he can partake even fleetingly. Yet it is his ‘set pieces’ like ‘Archaeopteryx’ which show Jones at his best. The fossil (a resonant poetic vehicle at the best of times) is rendered with truly breathtaking ease by a poet enjoying his powers:
Fluting of bones, a silk-screen print on stone:
the first bird on the cross of its skeleton.
From wicks of wrists watermark wings aureole
the smashed harps of its ribs;
It ought to be clear that I’m a big fan of this poetry. Jones is – relatively – less successful, however, when he strays from what he does best into closed forms that don’t suit his gifts quite so much. The heavily-rhymed terza rima-like ‘Every Time’ and ‘Lovers by the Ice-Age Tarn’ are both examples of formal decisions which dissipate his energy somehow. Compared to his best stuff these poems feel like the contractual obligations of a serious poet stretching himself and having fun with the language; rather than addressing his essential stuff. However, as Jones himself has it, ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’, and these caveats are small ones against a backdrop of overwhelming success.
At forty pages and twenty-four poems, A Furious Resonance does feel a little long for a pamphlet and one can only hope that Terry Jones has even more great poetry waiting in the wings for a first full-length collection that ought to be eagerly anticipated. It could stand a little thinning-out but overall this is a barnstorming pamphlet, full of good-to-great stuff, and well-produced by Poetry Salzburg in A5 with a simple and tasteful graphic design. Buy it and prepare to be impressed.
Martin Malone lives in Maulds Meaburn and teaches in Penrith. His Straid Award-winning collection, The Waiting Hillside, was published by Templar Poetry last year. In March, he won the Mirehouse Poetry Competition.
_____________________________________________________________
‘It’s a matter of where you tread…’
At a time when poetry is hip again and neat little reputations can be carved out with relative ease for the driven but essentially mediocre talent, it is curiously refreshing that Cumbria’s own multi-garlanded Terry Jones is not a man to publish before he is good and ready.
And good he certainly is: the poetry here is never less than assured, confident and dexterous in execution. Furious Resonance is shot through with the ‘wow’ moments that are essential to good collections and one can see exactly why Terry’s stock is so high with competition judges and editors of serious poetry magazines; for he is a seriously-gifted poet.
He does not shy away from tackling some of the big themes: mortality (‘Spuds’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Archaeopteryx’), the sometimes brutal struggle for existence (‘Formicidae’, ‘Christmas Turkey’) and the role and limitations of language itself (‘Sleep-Talking’, ‘Spinning, ‘A Posy for Heidegger’). All of these are handled with an impressive control over voice and form, and even when the poems clunk a little, it is the quality of mind-in-effort that remains attractive throughout.
At his best, Jones has a metaphysical wit that allows for occasionally breath-taking leaps of associative power: the burning of old dictionaries in ‘Preservations’ becomes a communal act of primal renewal, taking in the atavistic force of poetry and the imagination itself; as the pages ‘buckled like breath’ and the smoke is ‘hanging undecided on its next mutation / before turning to a dark wing’. The same metaphysical micro-to-macro focus is pulled in the wonderful fourteen-line ‘Formicidae’, when, as flies to wanton boys, battling ants are viewed from the Olympian heights of emotionally limited children, ‘Marvelling like gods’.
Elsewhere he is dexterously riffing on single details, exploring their poetic possibilities with a keen eye; as with a lover’s dropped black cardigan in ‘Arrangment’ or the moth squashed between the pages of a re-opened book in a poem of that name. In ‘Kleopatra: Room 62′, Jones marries a resonant central image to a surgical precision of detail that is literally enacted with his description of the mummification process.
Present and absent, I watched the preparation,
all its careful, careless holy butchery:
my hooked womb and brain flung in a bucket,
clots of mud in my little belly,
‘A Posy for Heidegger’ is neatly structured and executed, full of oblique possibilities and implicit relationships with its imagined addressee. In the sonnet ‘Black Rose of Yorkshire’ he displays his technical gifts; making good of half-rhyme and anaphora to maintain a light-touch sense of closed form. In poems like this he displays a questing, restless intelligence constantly inquiring of the world around him, ascertaining some sense of an unintelligible idiom in which he can partake even fleetingly. Yet it is his ‘set pieces’ like ‘Archaeopteryx’ which show Jones at his best. The fossil (a resonant poetic vehicle at the best of times) is rendered with truly breathtaking ease by a poet enjoying his powers:
Fluting of bones, a silk-screen print on stone:
the first bird on the cross of its skeleton.
From wicks of wrists watermark wings aureole
the smashed harps of its ribs;
It ought to be clear that I’m a big fan of this poetry. Jones is – relatively – less successful, however, when he strays from what he does best into closed forms that don’t suit his gifts quite so much. The heavily-rhymed terza rima-like ‘Every Time’ and ‘Lovers by the Ice-Age Tarn’ are both examples of formal decisions which dissipate his energy somehow. Compared to his best stuff these poems feel like the contractual obligations of a serious poet stretching himself and having fun with the language; rather than addressing his essential stuff. However, as Jones himself has it, ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’, and these caveats are small ones against a backdrop of overwhelming success.
At forty pages and twenty-four poems, A Furious Resonance does feel a little long for a pamphlet and one can only hope that Terry Jones has even more great poetry waiting in the wings for a first full-length collection that ought to be eagerly anticipated. It could stand a little thinning-out but overall this is a barnstorming pamphlet, full of good-to-great stuff, and well-produced by Poetry Salzburg in A5 with a simple and tasteful graphic design. Buy it and prepare to be impressed.
Martin Malone lives in Maulds Meaburn and teaches in Penrith. His Straid Award-winning collection, The Waiting Hillside, was published by Templar Poetry last year. In March, he won the Mirehouse Poetry Competition.
_____________________________________________________________
John North
An eye against the glass
How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. Terry Jones’s first short collection is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains ‘read’, the speaker going on to hold the ‘furious resonance’ of a bee in a bottle, inviting us to ‘hold the note and enter’. In the next, ‘Formicidae’, Jones turns to bottled ants, his vessel the sonnet:
We bottled them and turned them out to war,
the red and black on summer pavement flags.
We crouched to watch them kill and kept the score
of efficient dismemberings; thorax,
the tiny heads, the limbless in despair
They are transformed into ‘Paris’, ‘Achilles’, Myrmidons fighting ‘for the colour of their little nations’, before a brave-or-stupid final couplet defuses the situation with an uneasy fun:
And when we tired of our killing play
we smeared them on the stones and went away.
There’s a change of tack in the next, a great poem, ‘Preservations’. We find the speaker ‘on the day we burned the old dictionaries, / a batch of German-to-English ones.’ Immediately we find ourselves in potentially deep territory, a ‘Bücherverbrennung in the morning.’ Jones forces nothing and allows the poem to speak for itself, with wonderful play, from the pun on sparkle in the German ‘sprachlos’, speechless, to the beautiful description of ‘the last pages’ as ‘a flicker of inklings.’ The hesitancy of ‘Their tongues of flames changed colour, / red becoming violet, yellow white, / as if uncertain of their own identity’ is compared to the ‘sure-fire sense / that verbs burned bluer than nouns, | that adjectives gave off most smoke’.
A loose thread carefully weaves the collection together. ‘Sleep-Talking’ echoes ‘Preservations’ in the first few lines:
She was talking in her sleep, not clearly,
hardly English, as if sleeping
she wandered through a charred dictionary
as large as a house. From afar I heard
a mutter from a womb: it was echoic and grave
Echoes, wombs, graves – again we are in a rich vein of poetry, in sleep ‘the words / shifting to new arrangements.’ In ‘Arrangement’, the speaker gathers ‘inklings and omens like kindling’, shrugs off skin or shirt (we are not sure) to ‘arrange it carefully by like an echo.’ In ‘Moth’, the book itself becomes ‘a sudden paper tomb’:
Pressed in the pages of the book
a moth that must have landed here
has turned into this powder blur,
the one dimension of itself.
A disembodied Kleopatra views her mummification in ‘Kleopatra: Room 62’; in ‘Archaeopteryx’ we see ‘a silk-screen print on stone: / the first bird on the cross of its skeleton’, the rhyme delicate, the image exact.
Furious Resonance is a mixed bag full of gems and, following his success in the 2011 Bridport Prize, it’s been a good year for Jones. Originally from Bradford, now living in Cumbria, his reputation has been growing for some time. He manages variety without dilution, an array of form, language, theme – the rolling, unpunctuated style in poems like ‘Mirror of Dark’, a homage to the dark Cumbrian winter, sits comfortably alongside the sonnets:
dark we say and we are approaching Aglionby
which is two lights in the rain and we are dropping
down to dark Warwick Bridge and we see ourselves
in the dark in the reflection of the window
so dark we say and everyone is upbeat in the dark
belonging here and if you look at a globe
and see England and see where the arctic is and the pole
so we are up near the dark so you could walk
and it would be dark and we stand up in the aisle
in the dark mirrors of the windows with no outside
It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one.
John North is a past winner of the Anne Pierson Award for Young Writers in Cumbria and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester University. This review was first published on The Manchester Review’s critical blog after winning the Centre for New Writing’s 2012 Review Writing Competition.
_____________________________________________________________
An eye against the glass
How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. Terry Jones’s first short collection is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains ‘read’, the speaker going on to hold the ‘furious resonance’ of a bee in a bottle, inviting us to ‘hold the note and enter’. In the next, ‘Formicidae’, Jones turns to bottled ants, his vessel the sonnet:
We bottled them and turned them out to war,
the red and black on summer pavement flags.
We crouched to watch them kill and kept the score
of efficient dismemberings; thorax,
the tiny heads, the limbless in despair
They are transformed into ‘Paris’, ‘Achilles’, Myrmidons fighting ‘for the colour of their little nations’, before a brave-or-stupid final couplet defuses the situation with an uneasy fun:
And when we tired of our killing play
we smeared them on the stones and went away.
There’s a change of tack in the next, a great poem, ‘Preservations’. We find the speaker ‘on the day we burned the old dictionaries, / a batch of German-to-English ones.’ Immediately we find ourselves in potentially deep territory, a ‘Bücherverbrennung in the morning.’ Jones forces nothing and allows the poem to speak for itself, with wonderful play, from the pun on sparkle in the German ‘sprachlos’, speechless, to the beautiful description of ‘the last pages’ as ‘a flicker of inklings.’ The hesitancy of ‘Their tongues of flames changed colour, / red becoming violet, yellow white, / as if uncertain of their own identity’ is compared to the ‘sure-fire sense / that verbs burned bluer than nouns, | that adjectives gave off most smoke’.
A loose thread carefully weaves the collection together. ‘Sleep-Talking’ echoes ‘Preservations’ in the first few lines:
She was talking in her sleep, not clearly,
hardly English, as if sleeping
she wandered through a charred dictionary
as large as a house. From afar I heard
a mutter from a womb: it was echoic and grave
Echoes, wombs, graves – again we are in a rich vein of poetry, in sleep ‘the words / shifting to new arrangements.’ In ‘Arrangement’, the speaker gathers ‘inklings and omens like kindling’, shrugs off skin or shirt (we are not sure) to ‘arrange it carefully by like an echo.’ In ‘Moth’, the book itself becomes ‘a sudden paper tomb’:
Pressed in the pages of the book
a moth that must have landed here
has turned into this powder blur,
the one dimension of itself.
A disembodied Kleopatra views her mummification in ‘Kleopatra: Room 62’; in ‘Archaeopteryx’ we see ‘a silk-screen print on stone: / the first bird on the cross of its skeleton’, the rhyme delicate, the image exact.
Furious Resonance is a mixed bag full of gems and, following his success in the 2011 Bridport Prize, it’s been a good year for Jones. Originally from Bradford, now living in Cumbria, his reputation has been growing for some time. He manages variety without dilution, an array of form, language, theme – the rolling, unpunctuated style in poems like ‘Mirror of Dark’, a homage to the dark Cumbrian winter, sits comfortably alongside the sonnets:
dark we say and we are approaching Aglionby
which is two lights in the rain and we are dropping
down to dark Warwick Bridge and we see ourselves
in the dark in the reflection of the window
so dark we say and everyone is upbeat in the dark
belonging here and if you look at a globe
and see England and see where the arctic is and the pole
so we are up near the dark so you could walk
and it would be dark and we stand up in the aisle
in the dark mirrors of the windows with no outside
It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one.
John North is a past winner of the Anne Pierson Award for Young Writers in Cumbria and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester University. This review was first published on The Manchester Review’s critical blog after winning the Centre for New Writing’s 2012 Review Writing Competition.
_____________________________________________________________
Thursday, October 27, 2011 - Terry Jones: “Furious Resonance”. Review by Lise Lyng Falkenberg:
Riding trains can be boring. It can be fun, too and sometimes quite surprising. Earlier this year I was on a train bound for Birmingham, UK. As usual I was writing, minding my own business, when suddenly I heard a voice say, ”Are you writing a novel?” The owner of the voice was Terry Jones. Not THAT Terry Jones from Monty Python, but the editor, writer and former lecturer at Carlisle College Terry Jones
Terry Jones writes poetry and we made a pact then and there on the train. I was to buy his collection of poems ”Furious Resonance” that was just about to be published in the Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet series, whereas he was to buy the ones of my books that have been published in English. So far I don’t know if he has kept his promise, but I sure have kept mine and what a pleasure it was to read ”Furious Resonance”.
It says on the back of the book that the collection ”explores how the spaces of the past and the present, the personal and the political, the conscious and the unconscious, and the living and the dead re-sound across cultures and languages in sympathy or protest with each other.” Big words, but true as “Furious Resonance” is a remarkable collection of poetry. The twenty-four poems make you think, laugh and listen, because Terry Jones has a way with words. His way of using the English (and German and Xhosa!) language is unique, because this is an intelligent poet with something on his heart and mind and an own voice to express it.
Jones’ poetry flows easily. Notice for instance the almost hypnotical cadence of the long poem “Sun” which prevails despite the huge differences in voice and verse in the four parts of the poem. Or what about the imagery of the poem “Sleep-Talking”? An everyday observation made into art. My own favourite is, however, “Preservations”, an unsettling poem about the burning of dictionaries.
“Furious Resonance” is one of the best collections of poems I have read within recent years and to think; if I hadn’t been on that train going to Birmingham that day in May, I would probably never have read it! So the next time someone asks my why I don’t have a driver’s license, my answer is going to be: because I like good poetry!
Terry Jones: “Furious Resonance”, Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series (PSPS) 5, 2011
ISBN 978-3-901993-35-0
Four out of five stars: ****
posted by Lise Lyng Falkenberg at 8:07 AM | 1 Comments
Lise Lyng Falkenberg (born May 17, 1962), is a Danish writer of mostly fiction and works of literary studies.
Falkenberg was born in Odense, Denmark. Since her first in 1983, a dozen of her books have been published as well as hundreds of articles, essays and reviews on movies, plays, literature, art and music. She has a Ph.D. in literature and cultural studies and is currently living in the city of Odense, Denmark, where she works both as a writer and as an international freelance journalist.
Falkenberg has written two of her books directly for the English-language market,namely:
· The Monkees - caught in a false image, ISBN 87-90767-31-4, 2001, on the American TV-series/pop band The Monkees
· Twisted Tales of Thanatos, ISBN 87-90767-72-1, 2003, a collection of short stories written in the magic realistic genre.
Since 2005, Falkenberg has worked with British rock band Slade, especially their drummer Don Powell and this has led to a string of Slade-related blogs on the internet as well as many articles and interviews in magazines and papers. In 2006 Don Powell asked Falkenberg to write his biography and the book is due to hit stores in late 2010.
Terry Jones writes poetry and we made a pact then and there on the train. I was to buy his collection of poems ”Furious Resonance” that was just about to be published in the Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet series, whereas he was to buy the ones of my books that have been published in English. So far I don’t know if he has kept his promise, but I sure have kept mine and what a pleasure it was to read ”Furious Resonance”.
It says on the back of the book that the collection ”explores how the spaces of the past and the present, the personal and the political, the conscious and the unconscious, and the living and the dead re-sound across cultures and languages in sympathy or protest with each other.” Big words, but true as “Furious Resonance” is a remarkable collection of poetry. The twenty-four poems make you think, laugh and listen, because Terry Jones has a way with words. His way of using the English (and German and Xhosa!) language is unique, because this is an intelligent poet with something on his heart and mind and an own voice to express it.
Jones’ poetry flows easily. Notice for instance the almost hypnotical cadence of the long poem “Sun” which prevails despite the huge differences in voice and verse in the four parts of the poem. Or what about the imagery of the poem “Sleep-Talking”? An everyday observation made into art. My own favourite is, however, “Preservations”, an unsettling poem about the burning of dictionaries.
“Furious Resonance” is one of the best collections of poems I have read within recent years and to think; if I hadn’t been on that train going to Birmingham that day in May, I would probably never have read it! So the next time someone asks my why I don’t have a driver’s license, my answer is going to be: because I like good poetry!
Terry Jones: “Furious Resonance”, Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series (PSPS) 5, 2011
ISBN 978-3-901993-35-0
Four out of five stars: ****
posted by Lise Lyng Falkenberg at 8:07 AM | 1 Comments
Lise Lyng Falkenberg (born May 17, 1962), is a Danish writer of mostly fiction and works of literary studies.
Falkenberg was born in Odense, Denmark. Since her first in 1983, a dozen of her books have been published as well as hundreds of articles, essays and reviews on movies, plays, literature, art and music. She has a Ph.D. in literature and cultural studies and is currently living in the city of Odense, Denmark, where she works both as a writer and as an international freelance journalist.
Falkenberg has written two of her books directly for the English-language market,namely:
· The Monkees - caught in a false image, ISBN 87-90767-31-4, 2001, on the American TV-series/pop band The Monkees
· Twisted Tales of Thanatos, ISBN 87-90767-72-1, 2003, a collection of short stories written in the magic realistic genre.
Since 2005, Falkenberg has worked with British rock band Slade, especially their drummer Don Powell and this has led to a string of Slade-related blogs on the internet as well as many articles and interviews in magazines and papers. In 2006 Don Powell asked Falkenberg to write his biography and the book is due to hit stores in late 2010.