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Poems
During Diana's lifetime very few of her poems were published, and those mainly in SF zines. Before she died, Diana gave her poems to her sister, Isobel Armstrong, to arrange for their publication. This collection has been selected by Isobel to reflect Diana's wide range of interests. Poems is aimed at an adult readership.
- GenresPoetry
125 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2019
60 people want to read
About the author
Diana Wynne Jones
118 books12k followersDiana Wynne Jones was a celebrated British writer best known for her inventive and influential works of fantasy for children and young adults. Her stories often combined magical worlds with science fiction elements, parallel universes, and a sharp sense of humor. Among her most beloved books are Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci series, The Dalemark Quartet, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and the satirical The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Her work gained renewed attention and readership with the popularity of the Harry Potter series, to which her books have frequently been compared.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 8, 2024
The cover of this posthumous collection of poems by Diana Wynne Jones, who died in 2011, has a photo by Anja Huisman of some seed pods (or rather, siliques) from the plant called honesty.
Sometimes called moonpennies, the pods’ technical name derives from the Latin siliquæ, silver coins from the Roman period, perhaps because their mother of pearl appearance suggested coinage; and because the seeds are clearly visible between the transparent membranes the plant came to be called ‘honesty’ in the Middle Ages.
The impetus for including this photo in the cover design is therefore easily explained: it comes from the poem ‘Upon the Cover Design of a Book of Poems’, the subject of which is ‘a dry plant, | Honesty, a nacreous vegetable’. And, truly, one could say that many of the pieces included here are not only honest but also coins of no small value.
As the author’s sister, Isobel Armstrong, writes in the introduction, “readers expecting to find a poetic equivalent of the novels will be disappointed. [F]or the most part the stories and the poems occupy separate worlds.” But those who’d like to see a different side to the Diana Wynne Jones of Howl’s Moving Castle, Charmed Life and The Homeward Bounders will definitely not be disappointed. The selection of over five dozen pieces may well cause the reader to marvel at the range of her imagination, and be astonished and moved by the emotions she conjures up.
I love the variety present in these pages. One poem begins matter-of-factly “I hope angels are not | Like the paintings | Those prim persons | With pale haloes | Round prayerful faces | Neatly folded wings | A busy tumble of nightdress […]”. In an extract from a 'War Requiem' we encounter an enigmatic stanza on what may emerge on emerging from sleep:
Elsewhere, the wry commentary of ‘The Sad Tale’ will at least encourage a smile to play around the reader’s lips: “Here’s a story sad but true, | Let it be a warning. | Nothing anyone can do | Will get Mummy up in the morning.”
The poems are spread around eight sections: some are linked by more abstract concepts (Myths or Mysteries, for example), a few relate to what we can loosely regard as organisms (Children, The Living World), but even in those there are no real hard and fast divisions. In a section entitled Love you’ll find poems entitled ‘Eros’ and ‘Persephone’, and in one of the longer sections (Elegy — Loss, Death and Time) there’ll be intensely heartfelt verses about war, ageing, birth and passing strangers in the street.
Jones gives us surprises at every turn of the page. “What did Lazarus do with | The rest of his days?” she asks; there are arresting images and similes (honesty pods compared with fingernails or “fair fans of flimsy | With dark hearts”) and unusual alliterations (“the furrow filmed with green”, Wotan on the ash-tree has “wind-wagged bones”).
And she also explores different poetic forms with relish. Free verse and haiku rub shoulders with nursery rhyme and rhyming quatrains, villanelle and sestina sit cheek by jowl with a parody (of a Scottish song, say, or a traditional Christmas song) and a variation on the sonnet. She draws on Nature and her own family for inspiration, she riffs on Ancient Greek, Nordic, Irish and Welsh myth, she even borrows from Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythos.
And bookending the collection are a version of ‘How Many Miles to Babylon?’ – a poem that of course featured in her Magid fantasy Deep Secret – and the last poem she wrote, early in March 2011, ‘Blackbirds’. The poignancy of its final lines won’t elude staunch fans of this still highly-regarded author and, I suppose we must also now firmly acknowledge, poet.
Sometimes called moonpennies, the pods’ technical name derives from the Latin siliquæ, silver coins from the Roman period, perhaps because their mother of pearl appearance suggested coinage; and because the seeds are clearly visible between the transparent membranes the plant came to be called ‘honesty’ in the Middle Ages.
The impetus for including this photo in the cover design is therefore easily explained: it comes from the poem ‘Upon the Cover Design of a Book of Poems’, the subject of which is ‘a dry plant, | Honesty, a nacreous vegetable’. And, truly, one could say that many of the pieces included here are not only honest but also coins of no small value.
As the author’s sister, Isobel Armstrong, writes in the introduction, “readers expecting to find a poetic equivalent of the novels will be disappointed. [F]or the most part the stories and the poems occupy separate worlds.” But those who’d like to see a different side to the Diana Wynne Jones of Howl’s Moving Castle, Charmed Life and The Homeward Bounders will definitely not be disappointed. The selection of over five dozen pieces may well cause the reader to marvel at the range of her imagination, and be astonished and moved by the emotions she conjures up.
I love the variety present in these pages. One poem begins matter-of-factly “I hope angels are not | Like the paintings | Those prim persons | With pale haloes | Round prayerful faces | Neatly folded wings | A busy tumble of nightdress […]”. In an extract from a 'War Requiem' we encounter an enigmatic stanza on what may emerge on emerging from sleep:
Crying a phrase in dreams,
The voices wail,
Reverberate and fail,
So that waking seems
Water swirled in a pail.
Elsewhere, the wry commentary of ‘The Sad Tale’ will at least encourage a smile to play around the reader’s lips: “Here’s a story sad but true, | Let it be a warning. | Nothing anyone can do | Will get Mummy up in the morning.”
The poems are spread around eight sections: some are linked by more abstract concepts (Myths or Mysteries, for example), a few relate to what we can loosely regard as organisms (Children, The Living World), but even in those there are no real hard and fast divisions. In a section entitled Love you’ll find poems entitled ‘Eros’ and ‘Persephone’, and in one of the longer sections (Elegy — Loss, Death and Time) there’ll be intensely heartfelt verses about war, ageing, birth and passing strangers in the street.
Jones gives us surprises at every turn of the page. “What did Lazarus do with | The rest of his days?” she asks; there are arresting images and similes (honesty pods compared with fingernails or “fair fans of flimsy | With dark hearts”) and unusual alliterations (“the furrow filmed with green”, Wotan on the ash-tree has “wind-wagged bones”).
And she also explores different poetic forms with relish. Free verse and haiku rub shoulders with nursery rhyme and rhyming quatrains, villanelle and sestina sit cheek by jowl with a parody (of a Scottish song, say, or a traditional Christmas song) and a variation on the sonnet. She draws on Nature and her own family for inspiration, she riffs on Ancient Greek, Nordic, Irish and Welsh myth, she even borrows from Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythos.
And bookending the collection are a version of ‘How Many Miles to Babylon?’ – a poem that of course featured in her Magid fantasy Deep Secret – and the last poem she wrote, early in March 2011, ‘Blackbirds’. The poignancy of its final lines won’t elude staunch fans of this still highly-regarded author and, I suppose we must also now firmly acknowledge, poet.
[…] Beyond here is thunder
Earthquake, rape
Heads roll, steeples bow,
Regimes crush and scatter
People dying. Always people dying
While these songs stab
The clearing gloaming
Precise here and now.
December 24, 2023
I am so glad this book exists and I hope it gets more publicity as time goes by.
Based on the poems in her novels and on her website, I would have said Jones was imaginative and intellectually engaging but -- maybe not a natural poet. DWJ is, it turns out (in my admittedly idiosyncratic estimation) not just an incredibly smart, deep, surprising, original, evoative fantasist but also an extremely good poet.
She's not a career poet, and you can tell -- in some poems, she gets more obvious and sillier (and has more fun) than someone writing for their MFA would dare to. She's also not (even to me) on the level of, like, Elizabeth Bishop or Wallace Stevens (though more relatable to me than either). But...
Her best is better than pretty much anything I've tripped across in litmags, also better than the Inklings. It's great to see her let loose her skill with language when she's not writing for children; it's also great to see that the most intense, strange, lyrical, eerie moments in her novels are a deep part of her sensibility (though one already knows from, say, her essay about the hidden garden); I was a little confused her sister, Armstrong, claimed not to see much in common between poems and books.
A small sample:
Based on the poems in her novels and on her website, I would have said Jones was imaginative and intellectually engaging but -- maybe not a natural poet. DWJ is, it turns out (in my admittedly idiosyncratic estimation) not just an incredibly smart, deep, surprising, original, evoative fantasist but also an extremely good poet.
She's not a career poet, and you can tell -- in some poems, she gets more obvious and sillier (and has more fun) than someone writing for their MFA would dare to. She's also not (even to me) on the level of, like, Elizabeth Bishop or Wallace Stevens (though more relatable to me than either). But...
Her best is better than pretty much anything I've tripped across in litmags, also better than the Inklings. It's great to see her let loose her skill with language when she's not writing for children; it's also great to see that the most intense, strange, lyrical, eerie moments in her novels are a deep part of her sensibility (though one already knows from, say, her essay about the hidden garden); I was a little confused her sister, Armstrong, claimed not to see much in common between poems and books.
A small sample:
Hoist ears inside your tunnel, rabbit-man. I say
you sit nibbling stalks the same short way
down to your dimension. Pallid person,
to your thumper's soul, peace is not passion
spent, but out at interest prudently
bringing a small but safe return.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews