I want to say that this is not poetry for the young. Of course anyone can read it, admire the wit and the wordplay, lose track of the number of perfect lines that emerge, page after page. But there is something else. I looked back to my review of one of Jones’ earlier books Brink, my introduction to her work and to date the only one of her many collections I’ve been able to readily obtain. I was surprised to see my response to that work so very closely echoed my reaction to this book two years on. My review reflects the fact. From the mention of a conversation I had with Caribbean-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip about how, at its best, poetry comes from lived experience, and decades of it, to the way I found in the queerness of Jones’ poems a rare, even unlikely, resonance with my own strangely gendered history. These very same ideas came to mind when I started thinking about how to write about A History of What I’ll Become, but I can’t simply tread the same paths again. And fortunately, I don’t have to.
As her twelfth full-length book of poetry, this new collection carries many of the threads that thrilled me in her earlier work, qualities of her poetic sensibility no doubt, but somehow it feels larger, bolder, more intense, and yet as wise, linguistically playful and physically fragile. At times I am aware that I don’t know enough about the craft of writing poetry to appreciate the forms, inspirations and influences she may be drawing on. I notice the improvisations and the poems constructed of her own dismantled and reorganized present and earlier material. But what’s important is the final measure; what comes across on the page. That’s what matters. I read, write about and even occasionally write poetry in appreciative ignorance. I attend to the impact of the emotion, the power of the word. And there is something thrillingly immediate in Jones’ language. She knows how to “listen hard” for the song; there are stanzas and passages in which I instantly recognize my own existence. Strangely (or perhaps not so), I feel comforted and challenged to be able to grow older in her poetic company.
There’s nothing sacred about me. I was born under stars
that kept moving. Outside I could smell lost temperatures
stolen dust my blood tainted with history.
But here I am without a prayer looking for gods in everything
that’s melting. I watch the littlest sparrow. It knows
where the crumbs are.– from “This Crumbling Aura”
Jones’ native habitat tends to be urban, domestic but not domesticated. Backyards and city streets. Places for coming together, in the passions of remembered youth or the sensuous intimacy of long-term loving. Spaces for fracturing and falling apart, relationships and bodies fragmenting against the passage of time. If Brink was a more intentionally ecopoetic exercise—natural imagery and elements are a significant presence—I want to say that, in A History, nature rides on a deeper, personal, existential current. Nature reflecting the poet back to herself.
I’m less articulate than grass.
I hobble on my syllables
hoping something will surrender
a thought, maybe, a kindness,
a practicality.
A gap in the trees before sunset
does more.The wind picks up
as the horizon I stare at
slips away from
the slope of today’s sun.
In some places there are no days.
I could write it down
but who knows what colour
anything is?– from “A Gap in the Trees”
Yet what strikes me most in this book is the sensation of being alive, of life as it stretches out and shapes us from the time we are born—our temperaments, genders, identities, attractions—to a growing awareness of our limitations, aging, death. This is very much an embodied process, or rather, a coming to peace with the body, a learning to live with one’s body. I’m not certain this can ever be but a lifetime journey, one with different stages, elements and aspects. Not over until its over, perhaps. But it also exists apart from the body, in our memories, our expectations and our dreams. In our own histories of what we will become. That is the force that drives this collection for me, reinforced through the recurrence of lines in the “Improvising” series that runs throughout, and in the pieces that appear at the halfway mark, especially this, “Dream Home” which begins:
I sometimes dream of always dreaming.
I don’t think of that as death. But when will I wake?
When will I turn to you, go to you, come to you,
carrying night with me, the things I can’t tell?
. (As if it’s loss that remains, that no tongue
. can assemble within daylight.)
Maybe this dreaming is the immortal body,
dormant except in sleep, a kind of bliss that evaporates
each day, a kind of dread that escapes the waking
of shape and sinew.
And ends with the couplet:
To wake is not the opposite of dreaming.
To dream is to be unowned by anything but the dream.
Or, to be honest, where else but in sleep can we truly surrender to a dream? In waking life, especially these days, too many uncertainties persist. Dreaming is possibly that place in which time can extend in more than one direction, often simultaneously, making this poem a perfect point of balance for collection that looks to the past and the future, with room for both heady nostalgia and lingering uncertainty. But then, that’s just my reading. I would encourage you to entertain your own.
A History of What I’ll Become by Jill Jones is published by UWA Publishing.
roughghosts 