Rodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry" (Southern Review) and one of the nation's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces.
Spanning two decades of the author's literary work, a collection of one hundred poems includes twenty-four all-new poems and offers a poetic vision of the tension between history and modernity and a vision of his own Alabama childhood.RODNEY JONES, born in Alabama, is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Salvation Blues is his eighth book of poetry. Among his many honors, Jones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.
Jones (Elegy for a Southern Drawl ) writes of novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer's visit to his college campus and of the older man's sage advice to the students: "I wish someone would write about love." Jones took up that challenge, perhaps not in the traditional sense, but his poems--these are collected from 20 years and six volumes, along with new work--have found much to love, and to celebrate, in this world. "The old people in the valley where I was born/ Still held to the brogue, elisions, and coloratura/ Of the Scotch-Irish, and brandished/ Like guns the iffens , you'nses , and narys / That linked by the labyrinthine hollers of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains." Jones has a rich, Southern voice, disarmingly smooth, with a kick like moonshine and as satisfying an afterglow. A master storyteller, he offers language crisp and colorful, and his interests are wide-ranging. He delights in digression, following the trails of words, suggestions, and seductions. Attentive to detail and nuance but aware, as well, of the vista--the big picture--Jones evokes both the old and the new South in memorable lines. In poems that are smart and fun and honest to their core, he dispels tired myths and stereotypes, creating entirely new ones to our delight. Highly recommended.--Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
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Jones, who grew up in rural Alabama, and whose mother and grandparents (the poems tell us) were farm workers, pursues gritty anecdotes that place him within a Southern narrative tradition from Robert Penn Warren to Yusef Komunyakaa and Dave Smith. In this culling from six previous volumes and from new work, Jones (Elegy for the Southern Drawl ) portrays "cows named for friends/ and fated for slaughterhouses"; "the tongue-tied, the murderous, the illiterate/ And the alcoholic"; waitresses in "the Benzedrine light of waffle houses"; "a semi loaded with bridge girders"; mules, pigs, and hard physical labor; "fingers cracked by frost/ And lacerated by Johnson grass." As much as he chronicles hard lives, Jones (who teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale) shows an unusual intellectual reach and a large verbal ambition. While this ample book will serve many readers as an introduction to Jones's work, it also contains surprises for his fans: 24 new poems (some his best yet) build on his descriptive strengths as they incorporate political commentary, remembering high school, conceiving the end of the human species or excoriating politicians who sing the "Low-Down Sorry Right-Wing Blues." (Mar.)
[Page 188]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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