Viva the Real
Shortlist year:
2019
Shortlist category:
Poetry
Published by:
University of Queensland Press
About the book
Viva the Real is Jill Jones' eleventh book of poetry. It is lyrical, haunting and urgent. The poems explore body and place through a lively mix of the playfully inventive and more formal poetic forms, and celebrates resilience and continuity in ordinary experience in ways that are intimate, comic and elegiac.
About the author
Jill Jones
Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. She has published ten full-length poetry books and a number of chapbooks, including The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which won the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2017. She has also won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Mary Gilmore Award. Her work is published widely in Australian and international anthologies, magazines and periodicals, and has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. She has worked as a film reviewer, journalist, book editor and arts administrator. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University. She currently teaches at the University of Adelaide where she is also a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Judges’ comments
Viva the Real by Jill Jones is an heroic celebration of the everyday: doors, floors, a fence are each the thing itself and the word's resonance in the mind of the reader. For Jones the poem is an artefact freeze-framing thought: she is interested in the connections between the quotidian, attentiveness, and the resourcefulness of the poem to make legible our familiar. The mundane may be ordinary, monotonous even, but it needn't be boring: 'What kind of reveries do you think you deserve?' the collection asks, before delivering you 'dreams lean as leopards,' 'blossoms that pour like stars,' and 'flames, fruit, tea leaves and the sound of news pages turning side by side.' An antidote to distraction, Viva the Real is a marvellous contribution to the poetics of everyday life: it magnifies the moment and resonates long after reading.
