Poetry Mine
Reviews
Though there is sensuality in this collection (where the stream’s face hardened/under the breath of December) 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 (estate agent signs like flags at half mast) and his songs of loss almost a hymnal (my Hermon dead and buried/beneath a health centre). However, the tone of humorous self-deprecation can always be heard behind his mourning (now I’m retired/and in control/of my tenses). This collection deserves to be mined for such delights.Don Barnard (Birmingham Poet Laureate 2004/5)
On the motor bike and sidecar
standing silently together
hand in hand like lovers
These lines demonstrate how Geoff Jones’s poems work. 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)
I have read Geoff’s poems with pleasure and a growing sense of recognition. He has a remarkably mature talent and this 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. Mam, My Home, Passing On, Returning, Frozen Time and Nantyglo exploring themes of loss are joined by the anger of Cenotaph, Resigned, the ghosts of Dymock Church and the humour of My Uncle’s Shed. 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 of Nantyglo and the slopes of the Milfraen: adolescent posturing in Brynmawr Square's Italian cafe with Elvis on the jukebox; the ever-present darkness of the Pit - the underground world of Willie-John Davies and those anonymous 'men in Dai caps'
John Alcock (Former Director of Open Studies Creative Writing, University of Warwick)