Grounding Sight

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

D.G. Jones, whose first volumes of poetry appeared over 40 years ago,
now celebrates his 70th birthday with a remarkable volume in which he
explores new poetic territory. Many of the earlier qualities are still
present—a thoughtful, meditative tone, a bilingual facility that
encourages him to include the occasional poem in French, a formidable
intellectual range—but these are joined now by an old man’s
unabashed revelling in the details of simple occurrences. (One poem,
“The Simple Things in Life,” begins “like frying an egg....”)

These short poems—there are more than a hundred of them, generally
averaging between 12 and 15 lines—remind me of nothing so much as the
later poems of Ralph Gustafson, when he evolved a simpler, more sinewy
idiom that dealt engagingly with everyday sights and sounds. Jones has
developed a comparable poetic flexibility.

The variety of tone that can be packed into so narrow a compass is
remarkable. For instance, a poem with the state-of-the-art title “Live
from Lincoln Center” begins “Ariadne on the shore / sings death /
with the help of Monteverdi and / the Philharmonic,” remarks
sardonically that “girls betrayed to islands seldom / sing so well,”
and eventually ends with “laconic we die, and half the town / is tone
deaf.” Readers are invited to make intellectual and tonal jumps from
one clause to another—and to delight in the mental gymnastics and
adjustments involved.

I don’t claim to have followed all the challenging twists and turns
of Jones’s volatile mind, but these are poems that one can return to
in different moods, after new experiences, each time discovering
something fresh and unnoticed in them. Jones knows that poems depend on
language that forces thoughts and sentiments to dance and scintillate.
Would that there were more like him!