Transparent Gestures

by Rodney Jones

Overview

On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as "a brand-new world-class poet." This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395510636
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/07/1989
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

RODNEY JONES is the author of eleven books of poems. His many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Warren Wilson College and lives in New Orleans and Southern Illinois.

Table of Contents

Academic Subjects A Blasphemy Burnt Oil And Hawk Carpe Diem Caught Dangers Every Day There Are New Memos An Explanation Of The Exhibit The Foolishness In Manufacturing Just So The Kitchen Gods Last Night Among The Very Young Life Of Sundays Mimosa Mule My Manhood News Of The Cranes On The Bearing Of Waitresses One Of The Citizens Pastoral For Derrida Pure Mathematics Pussy The Sadness Of Early Afternoons Serious Partying The Weepers Who Runs The Country Winter Retreat: Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr.

Editorial Reviews

"Jones' poems cannot be absorbed in a single reading; but amply reward prolonged scrutiny." Publishers Weekly —

From the Publisher

In long, rambling stanzas, the speakers in these poems tackle complex philosophical issues, often with startling imagery: ``When coyotes hunt, they come as a clean silence / comes to a text.'' With extreme sensitivity, Jones ( The Unborn ) contrasts the Old South--its religion, its slavery--with the New South of the adult personae here. In one moving passage, grandparents sit at a table saying grace while a grandson worships the potato pie: ``The sweeter the pie, the shorter the prayer.'' Poems about childhood are especially forceful, offering almost erotic insights into the boy-into-man cycle. Pubescents ``endure the first hormonal surge'' at the same time that ``they still harbor toys: stuffed animals forgetting / their names, incomplete sets, trucks with broken grilles''; the body of the first girl whom the narrator sees without clothes is confused with a relative's corpse: ``I grieved them both and loved steadily as I grieved.'' Jones's poems cannot be absorbed in a single reading, but amply reward prolonged scrutiny. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a rich, personal, and complex book that draws on the full powers of memory and imagination. Jones writes beautifully about the epiphanies of childhood and adolescence, the girl who attacked him with ``a number 2 Eagle pencil,'' the tragic car wreck remembered as the ``windshield's splintering lens,'' and the sexual initiations involving ``fishy condoms.'' Other poems are quite topical and contemporary, including those on oil spills, graffiti, shopping malls, and the Challenger disaster. The best poems, however, are the purely imaginary efforts, where Jones writes in an absolutely personal idiom, as in ``Pastoral for Derrida.'' In that poem--and in the book as a whole--he explores the dialectic of language and silence, making memorable art from ``the ore of words.'' Highly recommended for collections emphasizing poetry.-- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

Library Journal