Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005

by Jones, Rodney

• ISBN13: 9780618624300
• ISBN10: 0618624309
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-17
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Rodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of thesouthern human person speaking in American poetry" (SouthernReview). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poetthrough one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four new pieces.In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Jonesconjures an America that betrays stereotyping. There is no subject thathe will not touch, and in his detailed vision of his Alabama childhood, he ennobles a misunderstood community. Playing the tension betweenhistory and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, "the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equallybewildered."

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

From The Unborn (1985)
Remembering Fire	3	(1)
Sweep	4	(2)
For Those Who Miss the Important Parts	6	(2)
I Find Joy in the Cemetery Trees	8	(2)
Thoreau	10	(2)
The First Birth	12	(2)
A History of Speech	14	(2)
The Laundromat at the Bay Station	16	(3)
The Mosquito	19	(2)
For the Eating of Swine	21	(2)
Two Girls at the Hartselle, Alabama, Municipal Swimming Pool	23	(1)
Decadence	24	(9)
From Transparent Gestures (1989)
Transparent Gestures	33	(2)
One of the Citizens	35	(2)
The Sadness of Early Afternoons	37	(3)
On the Bearing of Waitresses	40	(2)
The Kitchen Gods	42	(2)
Mule	44	(3)
The Foolishness	47	(2)
Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.	49	(2)
Pussy	51	(2)
Every Day There Are New Memos	53	(2)
Carpe Diem	55	(2)
A Blasphemy	57	(2)
Pastoral for Derrida	59	(2)
Life of Sundays	61	(4)
From Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems (1993)
The Work of Poets	65	(2)
The Bridge	67	(2)
Grand Projection	69	(3)
Romance of the Poor	72	(3)
Thirty-one Flavors of Houses	75	(1)
At the Miracle Mall	76	(3)
Contempt	79	(5)
Shame the Monsters	84	(2)
At Summerford's Rest Home	86	(2)
Moment of Whitman	88	(2)
The Privilege	90	(2)
Apocalyptic Narrative	92	(9)
From Things That Happen Once (1996) TV	101	(38)
Mortal Sorrows	103	(2)
Beautiful Child	105	(2)
Nell	107	(2)
Risks	109	(2)
First Fraudulent Muse	111	(2)
In the Spirit of Limuel Hardin	113	(3)
The End of Communism	116	(3)
A Ride with the Commander	119	(2)
On Pickiness	121	(2)
Ground Sense	123	(2)
Sex	125	(3)
Dirty Blues	128	(2)
Don't Worry	130	(3)
Lurleen	133	(6)
From Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999)
Down Time	139	(1)
Doing Laundry	140	(2)
The Poetry Reading	142	(2)
Refusing to Baptize a Son	144	(1)
Not See Again	145	(3)
Plea for Forgiveness	148	(2)
The Limousine Bringing Isaac Bashevis Singer to Carbondale	150	(3)
Sacrament for My Penis	153	(1)
The Obsolescence of Thou	154	(1)
Elegy for the Southern Drawl	155	(10)
The Assault on the Fields	165	(3)
The Sorrow Pageant	168	(3)
Blessed Assurance	171	(6)
From Kingdom of the Instant (2002)
A Whisper Fight at the Peck Funeral Home	177	(9)
Small Lower-Middle-Class White Southern Male	186	(2)
A Defense of Poetry	188	(2)
Bufus	190	(2)
Family Mattress	192	(1)
Channel	193	(1)
Homage to Mississippi John Hurt	194	(3)
The Masters	197	(2)
Moses	199	(2)
Ten Sighs from a Sabbatical	201	(8)
New Poems (2005)
Salvation Blues	209	(1)
The Attitude	210	(2)
Elves	212	(2)
The Boomers Take the Field	214	(2)
Sovereign Joy	216	(1)
The United States	217	(3)
My Monastery	220	(2)
Winton and Mildred	222	(2)
Avuncular	224	(1)
The State-Line Stripper	225	(1)
The Low-Down-Sorry Right-Wing Blues	226	(2)
Fears	228	(1)
Common-Law Kundalini	229	(2)
Sitting with Others	231	(1)
Thanksgiving in the Late Fifties	232	(1)
On Torture	233	(1)
Courtship	234	(1)
The Language of Love	235	(1)
Postmodern Christians	236	(1)
My Father's Big Idea	237	(2)
In High School	239	(2)
Vision of the End of the World in the Valdosta Holiday Inn	241	(2)
Olympiad	243	(1)
Rain on Tin	244	(2)
Acknowledgments	246