The Striped World
Emma Jones
The Striped World
With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and discovered lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings: of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Death encounters his own double and Daphne tells of her new leaves, 'They sing, and make the world.' The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless and memorable search for belonging.
3.2 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Poetry |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
64 |
| RRP |
£9.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0571245383 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and discovered lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings: of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Death encounters his own double and Daphne tells of her new leaves, 'They sing, and make the world.' The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless and memorable search for belonging.
Reviews
The Sunday Times
Sean O'Brien
"An interesting debut from a young Australian determined to write from the point of perception while knowing how many influences bear down on it... The oddities can seem wilful, but they suggest a writer vigorously at work to create what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion”."
19/04/2009
Read Full Review
The Guardian
Frances Leviston
"By focusing on and even fetishising language, are poets guilty of betraying the very "thing" they try to describe? Are poems just half-sized replicas? Posing this question demonstrates a greater degree of self-awareness than may be obvious from some of the other poems here, especially those that permit themselves to write more directly about art... the most interesting work in the book is also the most ambitious - those poems that allow Jones time and space to develop her ideas, and which make use of a specific historical moment or situation, something solid for her imagination to work upon, such as the library-sailboat in "Citizenship"."
14/02/2009
Read Full Review
The Times
Elaine Feinstein
"Sometimes her quirky images work, sometimes they seem aberrant: the stripes of cage bars do not much resemble those on the rippling flesh of the tiger they imprison. Her most moving lines are those that show the least need to impress: descriptions of her mother coming to Australia as a “ten pound pom”, for instance; or the look of old Adaminaby in New South Wales . One of the poems I enjoyed most was Daphne..."
06/02/2009
Read Full Review