How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going on to hold the ‘furious resonance’ of a bee in a bottle, inviting us to ‘hold the note and enter’. In the next, ‘Formicidae’, Jones turns to bottled ants, his vessel the sonnet:

We bottled them and turned them out to war,
the red and black on summer pavement flags.
We crouched to watch them kill and kept the score
of efficient dismemberings; thorax,
the tiny heads, the limbless in despair […]


They are transformed into ‘Paris’, ‘Achilles’, Myrmidons fighting ‘for the colour of their little nations’, before a brave-or-stupid final couplet defuses the situation with an uneasy fun:

And when we tired of our killing play
we smeared them on the stones and went away.


There’s a change of tack in the next, a great poem, ‘Preservations’. We find the speaker ‘on the day we burned the old dictionaries, | a batch of German-to-English ones.’ Immediately we find ourselves in potentially depthy territory, a ‘Bücherverbrennung in the morning.’ Jones forces nothing and allows the poem to speak for itself, with wonderful play, from the pun on sparkle in the German ‘sprachlos’, speechless, to the beautiful description of ‘the last pages’ as ‘a flicker of inklings.’ The hesitancy of ‘Their tongues of flames changed colour, | red becoming violet, yellow white, | as if uncertain of their own identity’ is compared to the ‘sure-fire sense | that verbs burned bluer than nouns, | that adjectives gave off most smoke’.


A loose thread carefully weaves the collection together. ‘Sleep-Talking’ echoes ‘Preservations’ in the first few lines:

She was talking in her sleep, not clearly,
hardly English, as if sleeping
she wandered through a charred dictionary
as large as a house. From afar I heard
a mutter from a womb: it was echoic and grave […]


Echoes, wombs, graves – again we are in a rich vein of poetry, in sleep ‘the words | shifting to new arrangements.’ In the following poem, ‘Arrangement’, the speaker gathers ‘inklings and omens like kindling’, shrugs off skin or shirt (we are not sure) to ‘arrange it carefully by like an echo.’ The book itself becomes ‘a sudden paper tomb’ in ‘Moth’:

Pressed in the pages of the book
a moth that must have landed here
has turned into this powder blur,
the one dimension of itself.


A disembodied Kleopatra views her mummification in ‘Kleopatra: Room 62’; in ‘Archaeopteryx’ we see ‘a silk-screen print on stone: | the first bird on the cross of its skeleton’, the rhyme delicate, the image exact.


Furious Resonance is a mixed bag full of gems and, following his success in the 2011 Bridport Prize, it’s been a good year for Jones. Originally from Bradford, now living in Cumbria, his reputation has been growing for some time. He manages variety without dilution, an array of form, language, theme – the rolling, unpunctuated style in poems like ‘Mirror of Dark’, a homage to the dark Cumbrian winter, sits comfortably alongside the sonnets:

dark we say and we are approaching Aglionby
which is two lights in the rain and we are dropping
down to dark Warwick Bridge and we see ourselves
in the dark in the reflection of the window
so dark we say and everyone is upbeat in the dark

belonging here and if you look at a globe
and see England and see where the arctic is and the pole
so we are up near the dark so you could walk
and it would be dark and we stand up in the aisle
in the dark mirrors of the windows with no outside


It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one.


John North is the winner of the Centre for New Writing’s Poetry Review Writing Competition, 2012. His chapbook, Northern Lad Meets the English Language, Fights, was published by The Freerange Poetry Project, in association with Carlisle Arts Festival, in 2007. John is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

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