Poetry Mine
Reviews
Geoff Jones is most assured with the history of landscape and the decline of working people in his beloved South Wales. His eye is clear and his songs of loss almost a hymnal. However, the tone of humorous self-deprecation can always be heard behind his mourning This collection deserves to be mined for such delights.
Don Barnard (Birmingham Poet Laureate 2004/5)
His poems are deceptively simple. Tight in use of words and spacing to produce an effect far greater in the heart than you first might expect. His subjects are everyday, his concerns loss and memory in a changing world. For Geoff new doesn’t necessarily mean better, and old not necessarily good. Like the past, the outside is never far away; the wind, sun and rain may come at the turn of a page.
David Fine (www.lit-net.org)
He has a remarkably mature talent and his debut collection will give readers chance to enjoy a new voice. Repeatedly in this enjoyable book he draws us into his landscapes of loss and love in detailed and skilfully crafted poems. Passion, anger and humour inform his history and his poignant returns to his valley. This is a treasure house of thought and feeling. Read it!
Bill Parkinson (Keele University)
His poems capture the essences of time and place: the landscapes and the slopes of his mountain, adolescent posturing and the ever-present darkness of the Pit - the underground world and those anonymous 'men in Dai caps.'
John Alcock (Former Director of Open Studies Creative Writing, University of Warwick)