Men Briefly Explained

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

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

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