Cirrus@Austlit

'Acrobat Music – Jill Jones’s New & Selected Poems – represents itself as a fixed structure from fluid origins. The subtitle could almost be “New and Re-selected”. The book’s form works. No doubt there was a lot of mulling, slow sips, cruel cuts and collage in its tailoring. From the reader’s perspective, the decisions and scars are not obvious. The feel akin to giving memory a pair of scissors to see what happens. As Jill Jones outlines in the foreword, “There is I hope, a sense of those various frequencies of light and sound and other sensual moments throughout my work, that these moments have their mysteries, those things we can’t know, or at least I can’t”. (p. 16) That approach to this book works just as well for the reader as much as for the poet. For the poet it was a difficult task. Perhaps the conventional chronological roll call would have been easier work. The shuffle-play of introducing poems from different periods to each other ferments curiosity. Knowing the structure is not time-based, you start to guess which ones were written when in this near thirty-year span of thoughts and lines. For the scholar or poetic nerd, the poems selected are boxed up in the notes section under their original book titles, so the red thread, drawing pin process awaits that reward for those inclined.' (Introduction)