Beside the meteoric flash of such writers as Leonard Cohen and, now, Margaret Atwood, Jones's subtle brilliance seems a pale fire indeed. This is because Jones is a poet who is penetrating with care and delicate concern many of Canada's more troubling aesthetic preoccupations. He is a poet of courage whose surfacing is always deceptive and often misleading in a country where the search for self and heritage can be so exhausting that most poets would prefer to settle for any mode of irony that would both expose the mysterious folly of self-discovery and, also, prevent whatever fulfillment of exploration might be possible.

This is the poetry of an imagination that was early formed, and such changes as occur are those of a style deepened only by tragic events. It should be remarked, nevertheless, how the centre of Jones's circles of radiation is placed in his first book. As a poet who seems only minimally ready for statement, he enunciated an almost consuming passion in his first poem in Frost On The Sun entitled "John Marin". Jones's passion is for art, form and the artist's ambiguous relation to the world present to the eye. Every volume of his poetry has, in fact, begun with meditations on this problem. The Sun Is Axeman opens reflecting upon Anne Hébert; Phrases From Orpheus moves confidently into the same kind of aesthetic dimension. By the third book, however, the self is no longer a spectator of a simple other; there the spatial order of his early work yields to an interplay, suggested in the course of the second book, of kinds of perceptual events where

          The cries of children come on the wind
           And are gone. The wild bees come,
           And the clouds.
 
          And the mind is not
           A place at all,
           But a harmony of now,
 
          The necessary angel, slapping
           Flied in its own sweat.

The transmutation of "place", which was so much a part of design for the poet to whom Jones here almost to his undoing boldly alludes, is where the ambiguity of speech and its mode of visual revelation focus in his poetry. But Jones, unlike Stevens, never teaches explicity…. The Canadian poet's persona is every part, no part, a picture and absence…. Conjoined, finally, to a love for art and the world seen as theatre, is a need for masks, either tragic or Edenic, whose rôle is to reflect upon how the place of tragedy—a disharmony of then—is at once present, illusory and quick with death.

If it is true that an exceedingly refined notion of art resides at the centre of Jones's consciousness, it is the sense of the visual relations of things and their deceptions that shades both the imagery and form of the poems. In its approximation to visual art, his poetry in fact illuminates imagery which is by its nature and in its effect illusory and deceptive. Similar to any image cast upon a screen, the "place" where it reflects is a blank, a reminder and menace of absence. The mechanics of beaming light is complicated a fortiori by the poet's ability to blend images. Jones's arrival at such aesthetic positions does not seem to be through an interest in film but rather via an obsession with photographs and painters, not only Marin, but also Klee, Chagall, the Hour Books of the Duke of Berry, Cézanne, Matisse, Hokusai and Chinese art in general…. These interests are [most] likely only aspects of an intensely visual imagination, and a peculiar bent for the way things come and go before the eye. (pp. 159-61)

[This idea is demonstrated in the poem "Antibes: Variations on a Theme".] It has been remarked that this is a kind of nineteenth-century travel poem. Among its few faults, this need not be numbered. Its faults are more technical: an occasional failure of cadence, an unnecessary use of "very" in the next to last line. Its virtues, emerging like flotsam in many of the stanza's final lines, should suggest that little is being described in this poem, but much is thrust delicately into our purview and then removed. The poem has no background other than the repetition of the word "Antibes". The speaker is a demonstrator; his rôle is to thin out the three or four dimensional world to a screen where action is naught, where, "under fallen stars", gods are aligned with "trivial flesh", creation becomes "reproduction", and where all process is a silent corruption. The strength of the poem is not the apparent idea, but the skill with which emptiness becomes a mirror against the reader's eye. The action of the poem has nothing to do with either the speaker or the figures he indicates. The action depends upon a random superimposition of accidentally related images. But the modulation of imagery relentlessly urges upon us the fact that fantasy, memory, noon, night, Nicolas de Staël's suicide, an older painting of Picasso—that all these show us how the world becomes picture steadily emptying itself of centre and depth: time, deceptions of memory, fallen gods, necrosis become positions and azimuths of the visual world.

As a paradox working against the persuasive order of the poem's stanzas, we are urged to believe in the momentary and exclusive validity of every point of reference…. To proportion visual interest is precisely Jones's rôle in the poem. Against the depth-creating properties of line, colour and form, the poet juxtaposes time, plays with the irony of language, remembers the images of other men and, without any suggestion of continuity, allows Antibes to die at noon, at evening and at night, while somebody eats ice-cream. (pp. 163-64)

[For Jones] the form of a poem, particularly a longer one, is a spatial composition in which the tonalities of margins, masks and fragmentary implosions create an interplay of voices whose perspectives mix "background" and "foreground" which, for the unwary, seems inhuman. The persona of these poems may indeed have no precise outline, but the effort to project a shape, to cast a "profile in the birdless air", to shadow forth the labyrinth of the human spirit in the formal design of the poem is what distinguishes Jones from the unexamined romanticism of his contemporaries. The persona, finally, is a creation of a poem's design.

What always characterizes Jones's levelled manner of speech is its reflective pitch. It is at once a meditation and an argument; it surrounds the world witnessed over the shoulders of both Narcissus and Li Po, the Chinese and the classical … pool of the mind playing one reply against another. Sometimes the poet's attitude emerges dry and pure, as in the image chosen as the title for his recent study of themes and images in Canadian literature, Butterfly On Rock. But the larger poems brood almost bizarrely over the water illusions of Narcissus's pool, a place of expected dissolution in expansion, and unforeseen restoration into depth…. (pp. 164-65)

Of façades [in Jones's poetry], the simplest is the mask. But the pathos of masks, as the poet asserts in the form of most of his poems, is their totally amorphous capability: they droop from branches like Dali's dead time-pieces…. Mask is modulation—it is in the same order of phenomena as a visual proportion. Hence their adoption by Jones is neither classical nor archetypal…. [They are] attuned to the mortal and transitory. The woman is often Eve and often Persephone; and the speaker, when not Orpheus, Orestes, Odysseus, Phosphor, can assume even the guise of Michael the archangel in a curious peripheral allusion to the dissolution of his first marriage ("To Eve In Bitterness"). The paradox of Jones's use of the mask is such that while it evokes some of the playfulness of Cocteau and Giraudoux posing past against present (the foreground and background of time), he seems to have abandoned the stability that past can provide in the mask. The past seems totally over in Jones, a blurred background. Yeats would recreate past; Jones's touch seems to make it more remote. To that extent the past belongs to the visual presence of time:

        The osprey disappears, dissolves,
 
        Banked at another angle on the wind. And so all things
 
        Deliquesce, arrange, and rearrange in field.
                        ("Mr Wilson, The World")

As I have suggested, to find in these poems, even when no mask is employed, a unified voice similar to a unified vision, is not necessary. Jones's strategy is field composition…. [In "Soliloquy to Absent Friends", Jones creates] a surprising and intricately structured panel description of the month of February in the Très riches heures of the Duke of Berry. Everything is there, the magpies who "drop sounds like barley in the muted yard," haystack, wood, axeman and drover, village and cold that "has cast a greenish glow / On the dissolving hills." Even in late mediaeval France, dissolution stood upon the margins, but within the frame there is "No distance, no abyss". Here art plays the rôle of the monitory mask and screen reminding us of that we have lost. The fact that it is ancient art transformed to word only underscores the elegaic character of the image.

It is a poignant intrusion of the Ptolemaic order upon a world where "abyss is infinite." Its only consolation is the scant cheer of a pictorial presence…. But no one can live in or by an illuminated book, and the poet's advice is only sufficient for that poem. We may, in fact, consider the didactic hortations of the last section ("Let us be bare, / Let us be poor") is simply a shift of mood to suggest a variation of proportion. (pp. 165-68)

Of the longer poems, the most achieved is the title poem from Phrases From Orpheus, whose stature and originality arise at once against the kind of technical tradition in which Jones participates and the modern treatment of the Orpheus story as it has developed in Europe. In this poem the poet plays off in a disturbing manner Eliot's "voices" of soliloquy and direct address. It is disturbing for he adopts, among others, the mask and mythological hints of Orpheus; he then speaks across the mask in another voice, more modern, approaching probably his own, and this voice speaks to its own, and not the mate of Orpheus, Euridice. Weaving through these voices is heard the voice of literary allusion; and that voice speaks contrapuntally against a kind of voice of no time and no body, which can be considered a parody of what Eliot calls the impersonal voice. This final voice gives shape to the modern drive to make the world an image and then to seize it as image. It is the voice of illusion, despair and loss made visual. Taken together, the four dimensions of the poem turn with varied response and intensity upon the several descents that the ancient myth evokes, and as the poem proceeds, its profoundly self-reflective character reminds us that Orpheus's need as a singer was intimately involved with the loss of the substantive world. He falls into the pool of Narcissus. Jones stamps his understanding of the fluid tangent of word and thing by an almost terrified response to the visual dissolution of things in time, such as one observes—and there are a number of poems that contain this mystery—in the punctuation of the "present" through an old photograph. Hence, Jones puts on the mask of Orpheus not to return the reader to a mythic past where there will be "no distance [and] no abyss", but rather to open into the shared abyss because it is more courageous, as he suggests, to embrace mortality than to embrace the image which is beautiful only. The poem becomes Jones's most sustained effort to probe his consuming passion for art and the dark it aims to lighten.

This poem, to an extraordinary degree, employs margins to define masks, and the technique exemplifies in verse the proportioned play of visual interest…. Language, of course, participates in the normal curve of the Orphic story: it is a katabasis of recessive backgrounds. It should also be observed that going beyond Eliot, Jones has split his voice to play off the problem of the gnomic (and, hence, suggestively Orphic) against the blankness of death. It is a technique characteristic of the whole. Its function is to point the central attitude that the gnomic must partake of an awareness of death. To seek the substance of gnomic realities dissociated from morality is to court a kind of total dissolution…. The place that Jones evokes is [a prison] … of several superimposed dimensions deliberately unfocused, as opposed to "clear". The epigraph to [Phrases From Orpheus]—"each in his prison / We think of the key"—points directly to this fact; and so also the poem's shape and central metaphor bear upon the closure of prison and death. But if our existence is a huis clos, some prisons are better for us than others, hence the dialectic employed between illusion and mortality. At the core of death the new life is possible. In that regard, Jones is paradoxically Dantesque, despite his efforts in [Butterfly On Rock] to persuade us otherwise. (pp. 168-73)

Most modern poetry runs the risk of becoming merely cosmopolitan. This poem runs not only that risk, but also that of being rooted in a sensibility that is normally taken for granted between the contending views of British and American writing. Canadians have made a virtue of remaining parochial within the blown universe. This poem's particular risk is that it assumes that the Orpheus myth, contrary to the usual assumption, is not a pattern for Gnostic modes of salvation. It is enough simply to hang on through death's winter that "descends like a glacier into the soul." By suggesting that literary allusion and image-making are metaphors for sterility, a kind of life without the definition of death, Jones is then able to persuade us that the Orpheus story, a major monument of our literary tradition, participates in illusion as well. Thus the myth subserves the poet's central preoccupation with visual art whose eye-play is the place of our awareness of mortality. Pure perception against a screen of non-death would be otherwise senseless. By so envisioning the myth as a dramatization of illusion and death, he strips the myth of its general character as a pattern or order. The myth's ambiguity is displayed everywhere in the poem's ambiguity. It projects deception as the only place where the self can be identified as an event capable of death. Along with other major modern views of the pattern, "Phrases For Orpheus" constitutes an important revision. Jones's burden is not that there is immortality in song, despite the ironies of language, but that survival is a visual craft. But such a burden is fundamental to his art, apparent from the poem that opens Frost On The Sun, and traceable through all the kinds of trompe-l'oeil that his poems hit upon. (p. 173)

It is [the shorter poems, however,] that distil the kinds of technique I have pointed to. They are not simply lyrical; they press carefully against their form at the edge of evanescence…. From the outset, from Frost On The Sun, Jones has sought a voice and a persona that without becoming cosmic would dramatize the problem of the world's conflicting claims. In "Phrases From Orpheus" a kind of resolution occurs in which the persona plays against other voices. The risk of the persona has less to do with language and silence than with the visual and non-visual presence of background and foreground. Absence in Jones is not silence but disappearance. Hence, as he remarks in "For Françoise Adnet", "Time is space, it glows." The longer poems seek such a spatialization of event; the best of the shorter poems employ such a technique by superimposing imagery in a manner suggestive of theatre. (pp. 173-74)

Some objects lose substance by being seen too much. Or, to put it another way, a frequency of modified images suggests the same kind of ambiguity as several voices emerging from different levels of awareness. (p. 175)

To seize mortality in the form of art—it can only fail as an endeavour. Had Orpheus been a painter, many things would have been "lost in light" and dark. Jones seems haunted by this: if art cannot possess anything by illusion, what can?… In [a] poem entitled merely 13/3/72 he speaks of the effort to make art mortal so as to overcome death…. Jones is rarely so spare: art is simply fine stone; mortality, thy flesh, with all the ambiguity that demands. Loss is broadly spatialized into a crumbling field. As in "Phrases", the action of actualization is dialectical for the speaker moves "a travers" as if to foil absence by becoming its foreground, by becoming finally the act of art, and so dramatizing an illusion played against the eye of death, "pour 'naître' enfin".

I would avoid any conclusion that would call Jones a romantic. I would say rather that I have been endeavoring to sketch aspects of a Canadian, of a classical Canadian, poetry. (p. 176)

[Jones broods upon the past, but] it is a past that has become untimed and makes the present difficult to perceive. It is an ambiguity peculiar to Canada, and Jones has observed it as well in public papers in which the American that explodes from Whitman to Ginsberg is welcomed as a continental possession, but the Pentagon is condemned as simply "European". Jones's response to the predicament is natively elusive, but it is as centrally Canadian as the work of Lampman to whom I have referred, and to Lampman's contemporary Charles G. D. Roberts…. (p. 177)