Bøker av Rodney Jones

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.

"It's Jones's age-defying distinction to have mobilized a moral intelligence that's sufficiently vast to contain multitudes."-Washington Post Book World Imaginary Logic is a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Jones's distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless. "The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones's readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren't quite paradise." Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of America's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Imaginary Logic is the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart. "[Jones'] poems are a work of hands, and hands-on. His rich lyric sentences register experience at the full and thus at its high moment of complexity. Like most of the important poets, he's a lapsed pastoralist attempting to restore-no, save-the fallen."-Stanley Plumly

Rodney Jones has long been praised for his masterly storytelling and the bold southern voice he brings to his poetry. Salvation Blues celebrates the range and evolution of his work over a twenty-year period with one hundred selected poems -- including twenty-four bold pieces published only in this collection.

With Kingdom of the Instant, Rodney Jones delivers a collection of poems that address both transcendent and profane aspects of the American South, art and politics, poverty and privilege. Always engaging, Jones "shows the intensity of his loving regard for every aspect of life, from the grit of the earth to the silk of the skin and all that churns in the mind" (Donna Seaman, Booklist).

Exulting in the speech of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones's new poems combine satire and ode, formal lament and ribald joke. James Dickey praised this poet's early work as "one of our most poignant and inescapable renditions of the agony at the historical razor's edge." Now, in his sixth book, Jones extends his emotional and stylistic range. He writes of football and feminism, of DDT and family, of crows and sex, of ink and raccoons and perpetual-motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it.

Things That Happen Once, Jones's fifth volume, may well be his finest yet, combining currents of southern evangelism, contemporary sophistication, and passionate moral engagement. Its forty-one poems display an exciting power of language and open up new visions of inheritance and parenthood, sexuality and change. In doing so, these poems release energy that American poets and readers of poetry will eagerly welcome.

Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems offers a poignant look at the American landscape: factories, restaurants, farms, empty fallout shelters, glorified malls, and transfigured filling stations scattered across the land. This collection oscillates from the personal to the political, from the religious to the secular, never losing sight of the possibility of joy.

In "A Letter to a friend of Robert Burns", Wordsworth wrote "And, of poets more especially, it is true - that, if their works be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished". While it is improbable that this assertion was true when he wrote it in 1816, it is certainly not the case for readers of his poetry today. The historical context in which his poetry was written - and which is often reflected in the poems themselves - is, in many respects, little known to today's students of the romantic period, nor to those who simply enjoy reading Wordsworth's poetry. This set of books seeks to remedy that deficiency by providing much needed contextual information. This first volume is set against the background of Wordsworth's life from his birth at Cockermouth in 1770 until his return from Germany in the Spring of 1799. Two subsequent volumes will cover his life in Grasmere and at Rydal Mount respectively.

"More hilarity from the folks who brought us Disorderly Conduct ... It's better to laugh than to cry when contemplating the court system." -Booklist