Acrobat Music

This long-awaited collection by major Australian poet, Jill Jones, selects from her 13 full-length volumes, published over three decades, as well as from numerous new and uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by the poet.

Rather than a chronological reckoning, the book offers a series of clusterings around ideas of the local, social being, environments, intimacy, language play, and reckonings with mortality. Jones is well-known for her ambitious and distinctive reworkings of the lyric, and her dextrous extension of experimental modes. Thus, Acrobat Music offers a major recasting of Jones' significant contribution to contemporary poetry.

'A leading contemporary stylist who has disciplined her lyric into a rigorous and highly economical poetry of description and response.' - Judges' comments, 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

'Jill Jones's work is characterised by its freshness and its originality, its sensitivity to almost imperceptible valences of language, experience and expression.' - Judges' comments, 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize