JONES, D(ouglas) G(ordon)

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Bancroft Ontario, 1 January 1929. Education: Grove School, Lakefield, Ontario; McGill University, Montreal, B.A. (honors) in English 1952; Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, M.A. 1954. Family: Married 1) Betty Jane Kimbark in 1950 (divorced), three sons and one daughter; 2) Sheila Fischman in 1969;3) Monique Baril in 1976. Career: Lecturer, Royal Military College, Kingston, Ontario, 1954–55, Guelph Agricultural College, Ontario, 1955–61, and Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec, 1961–63. Professeur Titulaire, English Department, University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, 1963–94. Co-founder, Ellipse journal, 1969. Awards: President's medal, University of Western Ontario, 1976; Governor-General's award for poetry, 1977, and 1993, for translation; A.J.M. Smith prize, 1978; Quebec Society for the Promotion of English Language and Literature prize, 1989, 1995. D.Litt.: Guelph University, Ontario, 1982. Address: P.O. Box 356, North Hatley, Quebec JOB 2CO, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Frost on the Sun. Toronto, Contact Press, 1957.

The Sun Is Axeman. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1961.

Phrases from Orpheus. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1967.

Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1977.

A Throw of Particles: Selected and New Poems. Toronto, General, 1983.

Balthazar and Other Poems. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1988.

A Thousand Hooded Eyes, with wood engravings by Lucie Lambert. Vancouver, Les Editions Lambert, 1991.

The Floating Garden. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1995.

Wild Asterisks in Cloud. Montreal, Empyreal Press, 1997.

Other

Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1970.

Editor, The March to Love: Selected Poems, by Gaston Miron. Pittsburgh, Inter-National Poetry Forum, 1986.

Translator, The Terror of the Snows, by Paul-Marie Lapointe. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976; revised and enlarged edition, as The Fifth Season, Toronto, Exile, 1985.

Translator, with Marc Plourde, Embers and Earth, by Gaston Miron. Montreal, Guernica, 1983.

Translator, Categorics, One, Two, and Three, Poems by Normand de Bellefevuille. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1993.

Translator, For Orchestra and Solo Poet, by Emile Martel. Montreal, The Muses, 1996.

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Critical Studies: "D.G. Jones: Etre chez soi dans le monde" by George Bowering, in Ellipse 13 (Sherbrooke, Quebec), 1973; "The Masks of D.G. Jones," in Canadian Literature 60 (Vancouver), spring 1974, "D.G. Jones," in Canadian Writers and Their Works: Poetry Series, Toronto, ECW Press, 1985, and "D.G. Jones," in ECW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Poets, edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, Toronto, ECW, 1993, all by E.D. Blodgett.

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Verbal clarity, economy, precision, and a purity of imagery characterize the poetry of D.G. Jones. These aesthetic qualities are related to a philosophical state of mind and a quality of emotion that give the poetry an unusual consistency of tone and meaning. The relation between an "emptiness" or "barrenness" perceived in nature, on the philosophical plane (recurrent images in Jones), and an aesthetic of purity in poetry is familiar, especially in Mallarmé, and Jones can be usefully compared to the French master. Jones derives more directly from the imagists, however, from H.D. and from Ezra Pound as critical mentor; later affinities are with Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He is also authentic in himself, and he does not resemble so much as parallel these poets in general ways.

Jones's first book, Frost on the Sun, already showed the taint of philosophic disenchantment and affected the shine of purity. The Sun Is Axeman revealed a marked advance in control and assurance and a full development of these features. Themes of silence, alienation, and emptiness recur—"a string of notes /limned on the stillness of a void" … "skeletons of trees" … "And silence like a snow is everywhere." A number of poems, with a patina of perfection, deal with lighter subject matter—"Clotheslines," "Schoolgirls"—and remind one of Gautier, the father of the aesthetes. A cosmic pessimism—"the universe bleeds into darkness"—underlies these poems.

Phrases from Orpheus is marked by personal suffering not unlike that of W.D. Snodgrass in Heart's Needle, but there is no further resemblance. Jones is not confessional; his book gives expression to pain and passion through the indirections of poetry, through the myth of Orpheus, through images and the incantations of symbolism, and through irony. Here "stars are not polite, and /even plants are /violent"; there is comfort in "that relatively immortal blue gas /the sky …" The poetry transcends the personal, and at its best it achieves a noble indifference or stoicism that touches on the heroic without rhetoric or mannerism.

Phrases from Orpheus is a deeply moving book and one of the most important to appear in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. It has, unfortunately, been neglected in the hubbub created by numerous young poets appearing on the scene and by the phenomenon of popularity affecting poetry, but the book will no doubt take its place as one of the finest of its time.

—Louis Dudek