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John Idris Jones by Herbert Williams

I first came across the work of John Idris Jones in The Anglo-Welsh Review in the days when it was edited by Roland Mathias.  His poem ‘To Ioan Madog, Poet, Ancestor,’ made an instant impression on me.  It began:

 Grandfather spoke of you
 (As she lay, arthritic, in her bed)
 As a large gay man,
 A blacksmith who shaped hoops
 For ships.  Portmadoc built them.
 So many you could dance from deck to deck
 The moil of labour in your ears mixed
 With the rich note of the native tongue.

This was the 1960s, when for most people the word ‘gay’ had nothing to do with sexual orientation and Portmadoc was not yet Porthmadog.  The poem sounded an elegiac note, mourning the passing of a way of life and the people who had nourished it. 

John Idris Jones is a Welshman through and through, and not only that but a north Welshman.  The distinction is important. He lacks the easy -sometimes deceptively easy - gregariousness of the Welshman of the Valleys. He is reticent, perhaps more cautious than he used to be, but with strong feelings that often find expression in his poetry.

His early experience of America – he graduated at Cornell University and later lectured in Northern Illinois – gave him a taste for the unexpected and a delight in chance encounters.  One of the poems arising from these, ‘Lawrence, Kansas,’ ends with three lines that I find peculiarly haunting:
 
 And I knew of course that with that yellow-haired girl
 Sitting quietly next to me
 We were all like Mr Ford manufacturers of dreams.

Back home in Wales, he developed an interest in publishing and brought out  many fine books under the John Jones imprint - which still exists – before taking up teaching.  His retirement has given him more time to devote to his true calling of poetry.  He has an unmistakeable voice, a ‘speaking’ voice with subtle rhythms and echoes not only of the Welsh language he speaks fluently but of the old culture of Wales. There is a sense in his poetry not so much of a past Wales as of a Wales existing parallel with the present, influencing those with the antennae to perceive it.  A sampler spotted in a Caernarfon junk shop sets him off on a spiritual journey touching past and future. An empty field inspires thoughts of the great house that once stood there.  For him it ‘still exists, like history/below ground.’

His most recent poems include celebrations of family life, a tribute to R.S. Thomas, and a vivid recapturing of Pavarotti’s visit to Llangollen which tells how at the  first note everything around seemed to be ‘smothered in a brown amber.’  A praise poem to his wife Denise echoes a line by Theodore Roethke:

I know a woman, lovely in her bones,
who takes my life as on a cloud

who takes my weight and lightens it
and takes my breath to ease around herself.

John Idris Jones, who will be 70 in March 2008, is above all a poet of place.  Wales is his home, Clwyd the hearth where he takes his ease.  As a young man in America, he knew it.  Offered a professorship in Illinois, he decided to return to Wales.  ‘Roots predominate,’ he observes.  One of his best poems is ‘Green Country, Clwyd’. It begins:

Place is important on this globe
of furrows with troughs of memory
following our plough. Everywhere
there are fragments.
A mound of earth will make a stone, or Caesar.

That’s John Idris Jones – ploughing his lonely furrow, conveying subtle truths in simple language.  Elsewhere he has written, ‘The sky is quiet with distant birds.’ Beat that.

Herbert Williams
February 2007