Richard Jones is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Avalon and The Minor Key, both from Green Linden Press. His new and selected poems, The Blessing, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry. Other titles include At Last We Enter Paradise, A Perfect Time, Apropos of Nothing, Stranger on Earth, and Paris. He is also the founder and editor of Poetry East, and over the last four and a half decades he has curated its exciting and diverse anthologies, including The Last Believer in Words, Bliss, Origins, Wider than the Sky, Cosmos, and London.

Praise

Richard Jones’s new poems typically start out on common ground, but after only a few lines, a seemingly effortless shift occurs that transports his reader into magical realms of the spirit and imagination, some serene, others sorrowful. Jones is a poet who not only knows that the world around us is full of secret gates but has a key that fits every one he tries. Rarely in poetry has clarity served as a springboard into such stunning, sweetly rendered, and utterly believable fantasies. Avalon had me locked in; I could hardly wait to get to the next poem.

—Billy Collins

Tomas Tranströmer once wrote, “I am not empty, I am open,” a distinction these visionary inquiries called poems also make with luminous results. Not since Rilke have poems made me this certain that, if anything can, art will mend the world. Whether he is traveling by foot, like Basho, another pilgrim, or exploring the metaphoric landscape of the soul, Richard Jones is our guide to “the true things that last forever.”

—Connie Wanek

From Avalon

Still Life

I keep returning to the unfinished painting
dry on the easel, a still life 
of yellow apples and a blue pitcher.
In the quiet of my sunny room 
I’m free to walk around, 
to observe the canvas from near and far
in differing aspects of light.
I close my eyes for a time, 
trying to clear my vision.
I stand to the left, the “gospel side,” 
as the hour passes and the room grows dim.
In the flickering light of candles, 
the painting grows more mysterious than ever,
and I more shadowed and unseeing. 
Many days I work like this, 
never once mixing paints, never lifting a brush.