Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems

This long-awaited collection by major Australian poet, Jill Jones, selects from her 13 full length volumes, published over three decades, as well as from numerous new and uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by the poet. Rather than a chronological reckoning, the book offers a series of clusterings around ideas of the local, social being, environments, intimacy, language play, and reckonings with mortality. Jones is well-known for her ambitious and distinctive reworkings of the lyric, and her dextrous extension of experimental modes. Thus, Acrobat Music offers a major recasting of Jones’ significant contribution to contemporary poetry.

‘A leading contemporary stylist who has disciplined her lyric into a rigorous and highly economical poetry of description and response.’ - Judges’ comments, 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

‘Jill Jones’s work is characterized by its freshness and its originality, its sensitivity to almost imperceptible valences of language, experience and expression.’ - Judges’ comments, 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize