A Perfect Time

by Richard Jones

In A Perfect Time, Richard Jones invokes the essential joy, suffering, and spiritual awakening of the attentive life. Jones develops rhythms of natural conversation and a relaxed tone, adding narrative and a sharp eye for detail, to produce a poetry rich with parable-like, aphoristic wisdom. Whether coming home to and his house burglarized, weeping over a nineteenth-century novel while riding a train through the Italian countryside, or simply cooking tomato soup in a yellow pot, he writes from a calm interior in deceptively simple, elegant language. Jones orders moments of mundane experience to reveal uncommon perceptio9n, going beneath the superficial to explore daily epiphanies that might otherwise be overlooked. His is a strange, beautiful and fabulous world.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Richard Jones was born in London and educated at the University of Virginia. His first book of poetry, Country of Air (Copper Canyon Press, 1986), won the Posner Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He published At Last We Enter Paradise in 1991 and Perfect Time in 1994.

Jones has edited Poetry East since 1979 and has edited two critical anthologies Poetry and Politics and Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. He is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Reviews

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poem, "The Novel" was pretty good, though it took a POV turn that I couldn't appreciate.