Jill Jones
Jill Jones has published eleven full-length books of poetry, including Viva the Real (UQP 2018), Brink (Five Islands Press 2017), and The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann 2014), which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015. Her work is represented in a number of major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Contemporary Australian Poetry and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.
Photo: Annette Willis
All essays featuring Jill Jones
‘Let A Thousand Errors Bloom’
Jill Jones’s oeuvre is difficult to place in the landscape of Australian poetry. Her urban settings, her skepticism regarding language’s mimetic function, and her open poetics, sit comfortably with the legacies of the Generation of ’68. But while she shares some of their tastes and concerns, her writing differs markedly from anyone in that group, and her poetry doesn’t seem profoundly influenced by these poets – or by any other Australian writer. Her work rather shows traces of the Objectivists, the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and European poets such as Tomas Tranströmer and Inger Christensen. Beyond this, are three abiding influences: Sappho, Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, all of whom were prolific experimentalists.