The Minor Key by Richard Jones
The Minor Key by Richard Jones
85 pages
© 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7371625-1-3
Book Design: Sabrina Szos & Christopher Nelson
Cover Art: Spring in Gościeradz by Leon Wyczółkowski
Perfect-bound
Printed on recycled paper
6” x 9”
To bundle The Minor Key with Avalon click here.
Richard Jones has written a magical book that sings of daily joys and transcendent sorrows. In tune with unexpected harmonies in our lives, The Minor Key exudes strangeness and eccentricity but possesses a clarity of vision that recasts and revises the world, often with redemptive power. Jones plumbs memory and heart to bring us to understandings with the apparent ease that comes only from a mastery of the craft. This book is a significant addition to his many poetry collections, which include Apropos of Nothing, Stranger on Earth, Avalon, and The Blessing: New and Selected Poems.
Praise for The Minor Key
There are so many pleasures to be found in The Minor Key, and as much celebration here as lament. Sure, Jones like Keats gluts his sorrows—in the tender manner he dresses his mother who suffers from dementia or invites the Buddha in for tea and discussion of the first noble truth, and his acknowledgement of the gift of becoming invisible in old age. By turns retrospective, imaginative, and formal, Jones unfolds these new poems with his characteristic, cheerful directness and urgency. We often don’t know where he’s leading us nor toward what revelation, but we hold on to these poems as we do to our lives and to each other, “happy, / if happy is the word for the way this feels.”
—David Axelrod
Invoking the melancholic nature of the minor key, this fine book is acutely aware that melancholy’s great practitioners, like John Keats and Robert Burton, also celebrate life. Richard Jones’ poems remind us that it is our duty to remain “shining as best we know how, brightly together.” Not afraid to ask the difficult questions—What should I have done with my life? How does one get on with living?—Jones is equally committed to seeing “the sunlit summer sumacs sparkling,” to finding answers to life’s large questions. Here are poems that console without sentimentality and see clearly without falling into easy, unheroic despair.
—Michael Blumenthal
Richard Jones gives us melancholy music in The Minor Key, but a music so suffused with tenderness that all suffering trembles into love and light. These poems arise from “blue notebooks,” travel the world, and return to rooms lit by candles or to a backyard full of roses, visited by fox and deer, where two people sip perfect martinis as evening falls.
—Kathleen Kirk
Richard Jones is the author of several books of poetry, including Country of Air, The Blessing, Apropos of Nothing, Stranger on Earth, and Avalon, published by Green Linden Press. He is also the award-winning editor of Poetry East and over the last four decades has curated its many anthologies, including The Last Believer in Words, Bliss, Origins, Wider than the Sky, and London. A frequent contributor to Under a Warm Green Linden, you can read three poems from The Minor Key in Issue 11.