Transparent Gestures: Poems

by Rodney Jones

On receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his third book, Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones was hailed as "a brand-new world-class poet." This collection of poems, rich in irony, sensuousness, and pleasure, reveals his robust, humorous, earthy, and cerebral view of reality and his exploration of all regions and sensibilities of American life.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[C. Varn]

An early collection for Rodney Jones, and one that has the beginnings of his particular talents on display-- a penchant for the banal made lyric, heavy-doses of irony, and strong use of natural language without the minimalism linked to earlier writers in the mode. In some ways, this reads like a late 20th century Whitman. While this collection does feel dated at points, Jones really seems to begin to come into his own here.

[Stephen Lamb]

Any cry begins profound, in the ore of words,
in the lungs' pink lode and honeycomb. It
thickens like gravity in the unbuckled udder.
Hear it, and you'd know the theme was loss,
or how every cry's a compass with no needle
that offers, anyway, some vague directions,
as the disbeliever offers up his prayer
to the razed heavens, to the absent gods.

– from Pastoral for Derrida

[Alicia Hoffman]

A gem. Unobfuscated, lucid narrative with a lyrical bent, this book renewed my faith in the restorative poetic power of story.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 J789t 1989

[Patricia N. McLaughlin]

In this collection, the poet’s work is “logic and the sure memory of disassembly” as he deconstructs the false syllogisms of racism and dismantles the engine of American capitalism. No relationship is spared from diagnostic scrutiny. Grace, when it occurs, is an accident—a head-on collision with an indifferent god.

“And what he likes best
is to break it all down, to spread it out around him
like a picnic, and to find not just what’s wrong
but what’s wrong and interesting—some absurd vanity,
or work, that is its own meaning—so when it’s together
again and he’s fired it with an easy pull of the cord,
he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel
clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost
like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.
—from “One of the Citizens,” p. 6


Favorite Poems:
“One of the Citizens”
“On the Bearing of Waitresses”
“The Foolishness”
“Mule”
“Caught”
“Carpe Diem”
“Pure Mathematics”
“Pastoral for Derrida”

[Nicole Gervasio]

This was okay, but I felt like the verse itself was too baldfaced and unlyrical at many points in time. It's politically interesting, but I'm not very attached to it.