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Pomegranate
Wine, Poems by Arlene Swift Jones
Arlene
Swift Jones’ Pomegranate Wine
is an expansive walk through history, both spiritual and material, as
envisioned through the eyes of women. Jones’ piercing lines strike
to the heart of experience and feeling.
Sample Poems by Arlene Swift Jones
“Pomegranate Wine is a
uniquely firm book of splendid poems, written with a Yeatsian eye. Jones
obsessively looks (neither glances nor gazes)—for exactly the right
amount of time—into deep interiors of the body, art, and the past.
‘I look for me everywhere,’ she writes, and what she confronts
(actually much more than herself), she describes without flinching, in
a form of poetic phrasing that steadily and confidently rises and falls.
My favorite poems include ‘Intensive Care,’ ‘Red Cabbage,’
‘The Tomato,’ ‘Black Barley,’ yet the small masterpiece
of the book is ‘Silences,’ dedicated to Tillie Olsen and illuminating
the writing silences of all of us, particularly women. Pomegranate
Wine is achingly true, a triumph of hard-won poetic skill and resolve.”—Dick
Allen
“These new poems by Arlene Swift Jones are terrifying in their sense
of desecration, pain and grief. And yet Pomegranate
Wine is instilled with the glory of Paradise, albeit lost, and
has at its heart a still small voice of hope prevailing on the far side
of endurance. These poems bear anguished witness to the violated body
of a peasant girl undone by a priest and a body-snatching anatomist. The
girl’s cry is the cry of a violated world: ‘Oh, St. Anthony,
make my body whole,/put it back into my grave, my little nest/of eggs,
the swimming sperm like kisses/to my dark mouth.’ Our eyes must
follow Erasmus unraveled by the wheel of the Inquisition, his intestines
wrapping ‘like rope on the spool.’ The poet too, like her
latter-day brothers and sisters in pain, has been undone, her body parts
snatched, incinerated, replaced by steel and plastic. Worse, the grief
of the body is matched by the grief of the spirit faced by the massacre
of the innocence which once was the world’s. And yet how gorgeously
is Paradise Lost portrayed in these poems! There is always the Iowa of
the poet’s youth, with its Brown Swiss ‘colored like cream,
thickening with calf, linger[ing] over summer’s clover’: their
‘great shadowed nostrils swirl air/into a cavernous dark, where
love was said to be, if anywhere.’ If the poet and her comrades
in Intensive Care are unbearably bionic, they are nevertheless ‘rooms
of hope standing/like ninepins.’ They may be split or struck down
at any moment, but still… As Jones says of Sol, who operates the
Body Brace Shop, ‘Sol makes me stand.’ The God of such a world
is terrible, ‘moving fast, mysterious…/unbearable: Leviathan,’
but still He is and leaves ‘his burning path/in the darkest depths
of me.’ Even if ‘the birds that sang of paradise now [are]
flown, or fallen,’ there is on a fountain of Rome ‘a boy or
little man/somehow misshapen, and from his askew mouth’ a music,
a song, as if some ‘fallen creature might say I am.’ Pomegranate
Wine ends with images of faith and hope persisting despite all
the terrors that have gone before.”—Rennie McQuilkin
“Outdoing even Ezekiel’s lively bones, Arlene Swift Jones
makes us intensely aware of how the skeleton moves the living, as she
depicts, without a shred of self-pity, how the arrow of time, its ‘blue
intent of steel,’ turns even Leviathan to the jawbone of the whale—mortality’s
white triumphal arch. As her sinewy lines reconnect to the past with an
unabated energy, remembrance becomes rich, sensual presence—a lyric
distillation, aged to perception, of a world of seasoned experience, art,
and natural beauty.”—Eleanor Wilner
ISBN 1933456116, 92 pages