Buy this book »
Read Reviews »
ISBN: 0-9579411-3-7
Author: Billy Jones
Title: Wren Lines: Selected Poems and Drawings Volume 1
Series: soi 3 modern poets
Language: English
Publisher: papertiger media inc
Pub date: 01 April 2006
Extent: 248pp
Height: 218mm
Width: 135mm
Thickness: 22mm
Format: Paperback
Distributor: Dennis Jones & Associates
Price: AUD$29.95 (inc. gst); NZD$36.95 (inc. gst)
Supported by:
|
brief description
Drawing from Jones' seven published works spanning 1975 to 1993, Wren Lines is the remarkable record of a creative life spent simply, and deeply. With more than 200 pages of poems and 25 elegant illustrations, Wren Lines details, in the words of the poet, "How it all transpired - the highs and lows, the day to day adventure of the miracle of being alive on planet earth, past-present-future-eternity." Spanning from the early riverbank journal poems started following the car crash death of his girlfriend Diane Kelly in 1975, to Jones' 1993 collection, Jet Lag, Wren Lines is a masterful and often mystical celebration of the unnoticed and neglected objects and people surrounding us.
about the book
"Wren Lines draws from my seven published books spanning 1975 to 1993. From 1965 on I knew that all I wanted to do was write, and this volume details how it all transpired the highs and lows, the day to day adventure of the miracle of being alive on planet earth, past-present-future-eternity," said Billy. "Its been thirteen years since my last book, Jet Lag, came out, and thirty-one years since my first book, Each Seed A Sunflower, was published. Each book is a big thrill for me, each the fruit of doing what I love to do write, draw, paint
so Wren Lines will have an even bigger positive impact on me."
I came into poetry when I found Crime and Punishment in a trash can in Japan when I was an MP in the Marines & a high school drop-out my first great book gave me the first inkling. Finding Leaves of Grass in the base library shortly after, the second. I didn't know what poetry was so I read it like a novel. Reading Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird in a Modern Poetry course at Pasadena City College, the third. I went back to school on the GI Bill. All those ways of looking at a blackbird really got to me. I knew I could write poems too, without asking anyone how. Later that day in a break between classes I wrote my first poem it was about a crow named Jimmy who hung around our Grammar School in New Jersey every afternoon just before the three o'clock bell rang time to go home. He could talk and perched on the telephone wires outside our classroom windows saying in his semi-cartoon cackle I'm Jimmy The Crow Jimmy The Crow Jimmy The Crow. That's how I began writing poetry."
For the past 30.5 years Billy has kept a daily journal of poems, writings and drawings. He hasnt missed a day in all that time, and his journal now numbers 144 volumes some 70,000 pages, including about 4,500 drawings. Of the motivating force behind this monumental celebration of life and creativity, Billy said, "I began the journal on the riverbank at Mary Smokes Creek, June 28th 1975, five weeks after my girlfriend Diane Kelly was killed in a car accident in town. I began it to cope with my grief and to keep track of what I was doing each day, because all I was capable of was sleeping in tents on the riverbank like a hermit. So the journal gave me a creative way out, something to do that made me forget myself. Just like that thirty years went by. Keeping a journal every day is easy. Not doing it would be hard."
When asked of the living poets he admired, the one-time hermit-derelict-wildman said, "There's a dozen or so living poets I admire most of them American but none stands out enough to be called my favourite. The last favourite living poet I had was Bukowski who died ten years ago. He was the only poet I could read after Di was killed. The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills Tom Shapcott gave it to me." Thirty years later, his old friend, Shapcott, continued his kindness by providing the foreword for Wren Lines. "He was a good guy to do it and so quickly too!"
excerpt from the book
PURE LAND
frog in bathroom
sink as I brush teeth
in oval silky oak mirror
moves out of way
of gurgling tap
chrome green
with white belly
spatula suction cup
fingers & toes
cascade of fl eeting streaks
in back of the eyes
skids into shaving bag
backs in slow peering out
must live in there
there goes my overnight bag
pure land of enchantment
what is a man
what is a treefrog
but this sudden curving
radiance behind the eyes
KINGFISHER EYES
Azure kingfisher
on a silver snag
diving deep blue blurs
into the muddy spider-lily water
splashes of sunrise and sunset
I swim within four feet of her
watch her preen herself
as I stand chin-deep
on the steep sandy bottom
eight or nine dives from her buttress-root perch
star hordes refl ected & rippled.
Paw Paw - one of 25 drawings by Billy Jones featured in
Wren Lines: Selected Poems and Drawings Volume 1
review quote
Billy Jones drawings uniquely complement his spare, elegant poetry and have a similar line and modesty
like the poems, they make of the unnoticed and neglected objects that surround us a hymn and a celebration. This mystical awareness of larger forces within the quotidian is what makes his work special
a remarkable record of a life spent simply, and deeply.
Thomas Shapcott
bio
Billy Jones is an artist, poet and emotional expatriate born in Camden, New Jersey in 1935. In addition to his seven previously published poetry collections (from which the poems in this volume have been selected) and numerous exhibitions, he has kept a journal of drawings, paintings and poetry every day since 28 June 1975. Started on the banks of Mary Smokes Creek five weeks after his then girlfriend, Diane Kelly, was killed in a car accident, his journal now numbers 144 volumes some 70,000 pages, including approximately 4,500 illustrations. A second volume of his selected poems and drawings, based on these unpublished journal volumes, is forthcoming from soi 3 modern poets.
|
