A Fox in the Yard by Peter J Jones

A Fox in the Yard by Peter J Jones

A Fox in the Yard is a remarkable sequence of poems centred around an enduring and hard-earned sense of place, combined with a deep respect of the natural world, its mysteries and our perception of them.|Ceir yn A Fox in the Yard ddilyniant o gerddi hynod yn canolbwyntio ar y syniad o le, ynghyd â pharch dwfn at fyd natur a'i ryfeddodau a'n canfyddiad ni ohonynt.

The cover of this beautifully-produced hardback features an oil painting: a figure, using what looks to be a scythe, is in the foreground of a green landscapeBehind them, just edging out of view, is a white house. The last of the sun is a red ball low in the sky. The image – painted by the poet – suggests themes of rural life, of humanity rooted in the landscape, of home and hearth, and leave-takings. This slim but tightly-worked collection delivers on the cover’s promises, providing a strong sense of place and community, shot through with loss. The place in question is the village of Llansteffan in Carmarthenshire, where the poet has lived and worked for the past thirty years. Each poem is accompanied by a short contextual note that encourages us to read the poems as personal to the poet. A number of poems are pen-portraits of local figures, such as ‘Top Mechanical’ featuring the ‘explosive’ Dai Lodwick: ‘He was a metal expressionist/Dabbling at gunk in piston light/And could frighten a boxful of dynamite’. Artists appear, including Glyn Jones, and the designer Colwyn Morris, whose death in hospital in Carmarthen is explored with humour and pathos: ‘How casually he ticked The boxes for admission, Occupation…… desert rat: El Alamein, artist: stained glass design. Allergies: ……….tinned fruit and vegan quiche, second homes, the nouveau-riche ...’ Poems memorialise the departed through vocabulary and register that are quite timeless. ‘Non Conformity’ is a beautiful elegy to a married couple who now lie in a chapel graveyard. The poem starts with a hawk’s-eye view of the landscape before dropping down, zooming in, coming to the shared gravestone, ‘That dips from mountain rain’. The couple ‘waken to their wedding day again’, are shown making their vows and sharing their first night together, which then becomes their everlasting rest as the poem returns them to the earth: ‘Hush, they are sleeping now/As the stars light the face of this land,/Hush, for so rare is the peace here,/Understand.’ There aren’t many trappings of twenty-first century life in this collection; rather, the poet is looking back, reflecting on a past that is both personal and public. When the poet does turn to the here and now it’s often to explore the natural world, as in the title poem, quoted here in full: ‘Moon about/That fox at night/So dark and green and glistening,/See that fox head/Dip the light/To sniff the scythe blade and the run/Of every silhouette and sound/Soft pillowing down/The farm.’ There’s something reminiscent of Eastern poetics here, and in much of the collection: single moments left to hint at significance without overt framing or didacticism, concerned with the natural world, short lines that slowly unpack the glimpse. These are the poems I feel are the strongest, rather than those using neat rhymes at the ends of lines in a way that verges on cloying, or where some rather old-fashioned phrasing creeps in to invert the natural order of a sentence: ‘Down the dog-boned lanes/To the woods deepening in ash and elm,/And there our secrets tell’.(‘Being Young and Full of Summer’) I prefer the slightly less ‘worked’ poems, and my favourite is the final one, ‘Seven Days’. It’s the longest in the book and uses a narrative mode to move beyond the strictly personal, trying to answer the question, why do rooks fly ‘on such tight co-ordinates’? Long lines and a tightly-controlled theme give an expansive, meditative poem about continuity: ‘I considered seas and the rock and pull of planets/And I saw centuries of rooks, a black shawl spun/Round the turning of the moon and the turning of the sun’. A wonderful poem to end a book of quiet wonder.

Peter J. Jones was born in Llanelli in 1945 and has worked in the public sector and overseas in the mining and oil industry. Since 1984, he has lived in the Llansteffan area where in the last few years he has resumed painting again. His paintings have been shown in solo exhibitions at leading galleries in Wales and Ireland. His university studies include education and Anglo-Welsh literature.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781912109579
ISBN 10	1912109573
Title	A Fox in the Yard
Author	Peter J Jones
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Parthian Books
Year published	2017-06-16
Number of pages	48
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.