Jill Jones won the 2004 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for her fourth book, Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems. Her fifth full length work, Broken/Open (Salt, 2005), was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year 2005 and the 2006 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. In 2007 she was invited to take part in the 23rd Festival International de la Poésie in Quebec. Her work has been translated into French, Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. She has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of multi-media projects. In 1995 she co-edited (with Judith Beveridge and Louise Wakeling) A Parachute of Blue, an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry. She has been a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator. Jill first worked with The Red Room Company in 2004, creating a poem on a pillow slip which features in the current Red Room Company & Shaun Tan window display at The Australia Council, 372 Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Jill was jointly commissioned by The Red Room Company and the Arts Law Centre of Australia to write an original poem to launch the Arts Law Week, in 2008.

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Temperamental Sonnets

Luck

Is it enough to possess such things,

the equivalent or the local? Is a leaf

enough to translate its world, or will

a pressure of wings enslave the beholder,

in fervent, continuous mouthing of enigmas,

less intelligent than elephants in summer mud?

Longitudes, Mediterraneans, species! Now

is the hour for a poetry of remarkable absences.

Therefore, take an inch of an antidote

to the extended and zealous flashes

of the whiteman in heat, while we hunger

for the original sap within the rock.

Whoever has the lucky ticket should leap

into what’s left of each wave and tree.

Whale Songs

Insurance lends a hand to the dream

but the dice is pretty much the way it is,

pretty much like the famous dog and its day,

just as driving an old Taurus takes guts,

you’ll need at least fourteen portions

of crystal and bat sheen, gingery flooze.

All those blustering gentleman, shining

balls on their whites, still can’t play

it straight in an uncomfortable clime

at the end of ages, as the whales approach,

now on foot and inconsolable, unable

to digest the folderol of the high seas.

The ice slides into disrepair and the acid city

finally measures the alarm.

Finally, Whispers!

With just a little science we can disturb much

in the time-space continuum

if you stay beautiful, and I’m steady, game

in the gravel — rendered from loneliness

my world pushes its conundrums, worming

clarity, dumb intelligence, animal feeling.

Do you remember how it felt after

the motion, or the mediation? Will it be

the goods or their absence, massive temperatures

between thighs, oceans and hot abdomens

sarin gas, river fevers, flash memory, girlie flush.

It’s guts, glory, then we’re famished, o tasted and gone!

Diversions, combustions, the changa-chang

everywhere! White teeth, sloppy kisses. Such words!