Men Briefly Explained explores all aspects of contemporary manhood, the humourous and not so humourous, where men are in relation to women and to society in general.
Thought provoking, impertinent, irreverent, witty, startling, this collection will have you mesmerised from start to finish.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Just like Bush, Tim Jones is releasing his third collection of poems, Men Briefly Explained. Boat People (Headworx, 2002) had tough, emotional content. All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens (Headworx, 2007) had some beautiful poems about love, sex and children. Jones came to New Zealand as a toddler from England and grew up in Gore. His dad was a fisheries inspector in Bluff. This latest collection finds Jones growing into a man. As a son, brother, friend, lover, husband and father these poems explore familiar sensations but combine a wry juxtaposition of good fortune with a bit of a bleak outlook. There are plenty of poems which are quietly devastating and really intimate. I liked his coming of age “happened to meet”:
happened to meet
fingers extending a welcome
household of tired gods
the table, drinks
then morning.
Birds, coffee, the paper
affirmed you
my hand on your hip
my hand on your breast
my hand on your heart.
Jones produces a few prose poems like “As you know, Bob” and “Three Southern Prose Poems”.
Do not be fooled by the funny-looking cover.
These poems are strangely compelling and slightly unnerving. A boy feels his feet getting cold and dodges rain, about to attend Otago University. Jones explores relationships with teams of people. Men Briefly Explained is a topic which seems close to Jones’ heart. He blogs about it often. He has a keen eye. This slim book is his best yet.
Jones extracts ache from irony easily. Some of these poems might be anchored in melancholy that some readers might find distracting, but there is prettiness to the sadness that stops you jumping out of the window. Men Briefly Explained is rich stuff.
– Hamish Wyatt, Otago Daily Times
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Tim Jones’ new collection holds men up to the light with poems that are intimate and playful, smart and satirical. He focuses on the rituals and carapaces of men and the relevance of that gender in the future. Men Briefly Explained is an engaging and provocative read.
– Mary McCallum, award-winning poet and novelist and curator of the Tuesday Poem website
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Tim Jones’s poetry is both worldly and other worldly. His lines form a clear and sharp insight into his own life and the lives of others. With a distinctive and fresh voice, his poems engage with the contemporary world, its environment, its human predicament, its politics, its illusions and its fantasies.
– Mark Pirie, poet, critic, publisher and anthologist
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
The poems begin in childhood, and end in old age, but this book isn’t just one man’s lyrical journey between the two. Other voices interject, other men are observed, and even the apparently autobiographical boyhood poems mingle a child’s watchfulness with a wry, adult understanding. On an assisted passage to New Zealand, for example, who is it who notes the passengers jostling for social position, ‘angling, in an understated way, / for a seat at the Captain’s table’? Surely not the boy who ‘roamed decks, became impertinent to sailors’, but perhaps the man that boy became.
Tim Jones casts a satirical but not unkind eye over his fellow men, and presumably himself – men who grew up in the seventies, who lacked their fathers’ number-eight-wire sensibility but could name the current and ex-members of obscure rock bands. Masculinity defines and redefines itself in these poems, which at their weakest don’t develop beyond their premises: a nostalgic observer, for instance, of the rampant, geeky consumerism at a sci-fi convention (‘In my day, / there was less money to be parted from’), or ‘Baxter-Curnow Band Live at Hyde Park 1969’, where it’s all there in the title.
The best poems abandon that kind of playfulness in favour of the bleak insight that comes with age – poems of men who haven’t lived the lives they wished for, who have settled for less, have made do: ‘Retired, he had his garden, / books, the heavy ticking // of the farewell clock.’ There’s a Larkinesque kind of resignation there, not least in the foreshadowing of death, but such men remain resilient, resourceful: the same poem ends with its subject searching ‘tide tables, shipping movements, // looking for a sailing time, / a vessel heading home.’ The final poems are, appropriately, elegies, both for individual men and for obsolete (yet still embraced) modes of masculinity. The men implied here are limited in their variety – heterosexual, middle-class, and white – but within its chosen scope this collection focuses sharply and sympathetically on these men, even if it doesn’t quite explain them.
– Tim Upperton, Landfall
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Men Briefly Explained delivers a unique, fast-paced, highly readable, sustained reflection on contemporary masculinity. Jones’ poetry has an appealing personal, autobiographical quality that speaks to the heart as well as the head. Once I started to read I could not put it down.
– Harvey Molloy, author of Moonshot, poet and teacher
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Tim Jones writes about how it feels to be a man, of male relationships – father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband – exploring territory that men traditionally don’t talk about, saying what is often unsaid, confronting stereotypes, and genetic imperatives. He writes with a blend of economy, humour and compassion that is rare in poetry, often finding the unexpected phrase – ‘a diminuendo of corridors’ – or an unusual, but exact, image – ‘mountains piled like thunderheads’ – to surprise and illuminate. This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic!
– Kathleen Jones, author of Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, is a distinguished English poet and biographer