APROPOS OF NOTHING
by
Richard Jones
Port
Paper, 63 pages, $15
ISBN I-55659-237-X
When you begin Richard Jones Apropos of Nothing, you think you ve found poetry somewhere between Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. Like their work, Jones poetry focuses on clarity, though it initially seems to fall prey to Kooser s criticism about anecdotal poetry. (See Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, pp.81-87). But as you push forward, you soon see Jones has cut a different path. And if that path is truly about nothing, as the title suggests, there is plenty here to fill the void.
Take, for instance, his poem The Spoon. With a spoon, he says, he can eat oatmeal, take medicine, swat a fly, make a mirror of its shiny bowl, or dig a tunnel to freedom.
Some days I think I need nothing
more in life than a spoon.
This simplicity, and Jones acute awareness of it, is examined all through this fine volume, as when he contemplates poets of the past in Home.
How lucky I am to sit all day on the hill,
looking out upon the infinite with Leopardi,
who, like me, accepts that he is nothing . . .
For Jones, what remains best in life seems to be the quiet moments of pleasure that can t quite linger long enough. When we read and hear in our mind the subtle music and rhythm of his words, we want his poetry, and his own sense of philosophy, to linger longer, too. In Plums he says: I liken death to a bowl/of ripe purple plums . . . Yet this fruit of life is:
so startlingly sweet
one quickly devours the fruit
down to the hard, pocked,
living stone of the pit.
So while life may be a kind of opiate receptor, death is quite real, as Jones gently reminds us in Help, where he must care for his dying father, cover him with a blanket, kiss him goodnight his father s face peaceful as an alabaster mask. Soon, Jones knows, his father s life will be motes of dust drifting in light, and his spirit will be a piece of thread/slipping easily through the eye of a needle.
Such biblical allusions are skillfully juxtaposed throughout this volume with the old principle of Buddhism on the rarity of human life. And to this is added the magic of the most simplest form of music, such as the cry of a bird, and the music of no music, as in the unimpeachable silence of falling snow; and the music of a human life, as Jones explains in The Musician, by which each day he is lifted up, a rare violin/taken from its locked leather case and played.
Ancient poets long ago knew there is beauty in clarity, simplicity, and the ability to distill something to its essence and yet express it in a way the audience has never perceived before. As Jones says in Night, he finds peace in the mind uncluttered, shining/like the moon, ready to rise.
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