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What the critics say:

"poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty. ... passionate and parodic at once, as cool as all get out." The Australian

"... building bridges and points of access and communication, forming a whole, prescient and often deeply moving experience." Poetry International Web

"... redemptive in an entirely secular way, offering moments of existential clarity in unsentimental material observation." Jacket

"her vision is impeccable ... invites the reader to share in the speculative processes of discovery." Heat

"one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Australian poetry" Australian Women's Book Review

"a singular voice, able to transform and give significance to the minute details of daily life." Christchurch Star

"[a] reputation as one of those poets who is beginning to move Australian poetry into new directions - towards a greater trust than ever in the poet's own responses, a quietening of judgemental implications, and to find ways of exploring the rhapsodic." Southerly

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Welcome to the website of Jill Jones

This is my main website. It contains information about my books, sample poems from the books as well as new works, articles, interviews, and other writings.

It also provides links to my work on other sites and my other websites.

Jill on a Paris bus
Photo: Annette Willis 2007

A little bit about my work

My poems reflect places which are mainly urban and strewn with emblems and texts, accidental or deliberate.

I'm interested in relationships between states and locales, shifting borders, the openings in closures, pleasures of exploration, the great themes, like the weather. Walking is important, slow mobility across terrain, the temporal process.

I’m working somewhere between the lyric and something more broader, more discursive, so I move from either investigations of interiority or sensuality merged with the figurative which may also speak to larger structures. The poems have become a broken song – fragmented, flagrant, floating - perhaps an abstract or ruined lyric, where ‘I’ has shifted from the centre.

The way I work has evolved from a continuing interest in texture, pattern and transience, of jumping in the midst of the flow, experience in language underway, asking questions about how the pieces don’t fit as shards alter meanings.

While not getting hung up on ‘the image’ as such, I’ve always worked visually. I’m not interested in telling images what to do but rather a process of seeing.

The soundings of a poem are also important to me, as is the way the line works. I prefer more linguistic play in the line emphasising both connectedness and parataxis, the flexing of thought/meditation and critique, including self-critique.

You can buy copies of my books online from the following publishers:
Salt Publishing
Broken/Open| Screen Jets Heaven

Picaro Press
Where the Sea Burns

Title image: Causeway Bay, 2007. Photo by Jill Jones