I know Alice Jones not through the literary world, but the political one – among the progressive scene of the San Francisco Bay Area, especially the left medical & therapeutic communities, she & I have several friends in common. Indeed, I met Jones well before I knew that she wrote & before she published her first collection, The Knot, after winning a contest with Alice James Books back in1992. At the time, my sense was that Alice was a competent poet very much into the hyper-personal side of the School of Quietude – a far less obnoxious subset of that world than some, but not especially my own cup of tea. As time went by, Jones went on to publish a long poetic suite, Isthmus, which won a Jane Kenyon award & was likewise published by Alice James; Anatomy, a fine press chapbook from Bullnettle Press; & Extreme Directions: The 54 Moves of Tai Chi Sword, from Omnidawn. One glance at Extreme Directions, had I done so at the time, would have suggested that Jones had been evolving into a more complex kind of writer. Indeed, along the way, she co-founded Apogee Press, whose list contains many poets I wouldn’t characterize as School of Quietude in the slightest –

 

·         Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

·         Kathleen Fraser

·         Pattie McCarthy

·         Elizabeth Robinson

·         Edward Smallfield

·         Cole Swenson

– tho you will find Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes and Valerie Coulton there as well, as if just to verify that my first take wasn’t entirely an hallucination.

 

Now, however, I’m holding Gorgeous Mourning in my hands, Alice Jones’ newest volume just out from Apogee. This book frankly is a revelation. It’s a sequence of 72 prose poems, ranging in length from short to very very short, that are as tightly composed as anything I’ve read in ages. While some retain a vestige of narrative lyric, they do so with a tautness & precision so exact as to border on the impossible, such as “Bristle”:

 

In the car, she reached over to stroke his thigh, he pulled away. The radio was saying “Skirmishes broke out along the border” and he wanted to argue causes, economy or culture. She thought of the Dalai Lama’s one naked shoulder, a life of feeling the wind in an armpit, exile.

 

One can certainly build a narrative out of these three simple enough elements, but even if one hears the second & third meanings within, say, border, the leap from thigh to shoulder & armpit is such a bold sideways stroke as to give this piece a depth & resonance it could not carry simply as “tale.” The final exile rings all that much more loudly for it.

 

Some of the poems here flirt with the new sentence, such as “Circle,” but my favorites are those that hold onto just enough of their traditional frameworks to empower the shifts within a disruptive as well as connective function, particularly when Jones lets her ear drive the forward logic of the writing. A good example is how “Reply” takes off from the mode of the letter:

 

Dear one, remember our moon-set walk across the trestle bridge, trees full of parasitic mistletoe? Are you still eating beef tendon and gristle soup with noodles? My unattended yard now blooms with purple thistles. They fire guided missiles from the mainland, pointed like flying fish, landing with a piscatory splash off-shore. Piss-poor shots, I’d say. The pistil is to stamen as mortar is to pestle, as heart is to well-aimed pistol, as I am to your epistle. Missing you, yours.

 

Read that aloud a few times. The stl combination occurs eight times in 80 words, not counting how it crosses the line with the pĭ combination from such outliers as piscatory & Piss-poor (let alone parasitic, purple, pointed). This poem is a feast for the ludic ear.

 

There are times, & this would seem to be one of them, when a poet so transcends the roots of whichever tradition they chose, that any reader has to acknowledge that they’ve arrived as a major writer whatever their aesthetic stripe. I might place Alice Jones alongside the likes, say, of Robert Hass, Annie Finch, Thom Gunn, Susan Stewart or Wendell Berry, all superb poets who come unapologetically out of poetry’s conservative traditions, but I do so knowing that this is very rare company indeed.