'This new book by award-winning poet, Jill Jones, revels in language’s restlessness, enchantment and grit. Its voices are full of complexity and spontaneity, urgency and delight. Ash is Here, So are Stars contains an expanded version of the sequence ‘In Fire City’, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. The ‘city’ in this sequence is made from textual and material intensities sampled from Australian cities, as well as traces of real and imagined cities that may resemble a London, LA or New York. The book also contains three longer poems that took shape when the poet lived and walked through areas of Sydney.' (Publisher's blurb)
'T he act of reading for appraisal rather than pleasure is a privilege that brings me to a deepened understanding of the contemporary in Australian poetry, the way the past is being framed, its traditions, celebrities and enigmas washed up in new and hybrid appearances or redressed in more conventional, sometimes nimbus forms. Judith Wright wrote that the ‘place to find clues is not in the present, it lies in the past: a shallow past, as all immigrants to Australia know, and all of us are immigrants.’ The discipline of reading to filter such a range of voices underlines my foreignness, making reading akin to translation, whilst reciprocally inviting the reader of this essay to become a foreigner to my assumptions and conclusions.' (Introduction)
'T he act of reading for appraisal rather than pleasure is a privilege that brings me to a deepened understanding of the contemporary in Australian poetry, the way the past is being framed, its traditions, celebrities and enigmas washed up in new and hybrid appearances or redressed in more conventional, sometimes nimbus forms. Judith Wright wrote that the ‘place to find clues is not in the present, it lies in the past: a shallow past, as all immigrants to Australia know, and all of us are immigrants.’ The discipline of reading to filter such a range of voices underlines my foreignness, making reading akin to translation, whilst reciprocally inviting the reader of this essay to become a foreigner to my assumptions and conclusions.' (Introduction)
