More on: Richard Jones

My aged father and I enjoy the silence between us as we sit in the Adirondacks, watching the children playing tag on the lawn and running in circles, happy to be it or not to be it, happy just to be, though I know they give no thought to being. My father leans toward me…

The pain passes, ——but the beauty remains.                             —Renoir Wandering the Musée de l’Orangerie with my sister, we find a bouquet of roses painted in 1878 by Auguste Renoir, voluptuous white roses placed in a red velvet chair. My sister says Renoir’s last word was “flowers” and that toward the end of his life he…

London is a city of churches and my mother loved the church bells calling to one another over the rooftops. She said you could tell one church from another from the sound of the bells. The bells were that distinct, like human voices. The bells at Saint Paul’s overwhelmed her, just as the grandeur of…

My mother was the first pianist I ever heard. All through childhood I was spellbound by her gift, her virtuosity. Now I welcome her to my house, show her the grand piano, and lift the lid to its full height and glory. I ask her to join me on the black bench. At ninety my…

In twelfth grade our English class read Milton, Wordsworth, Samuel Pepys, Keats, and Shakespeare. We reluctantly took turns reading aloud, but besides that I don’t think anyone ever said a word, not even when Pepys described the plague and London’s doors marked with a red cross and “Lord have mercy upon us” written there. No,…

  The Corpse Flower: New & Selected Poems by Bruce Beasley (University of Washington Press, 2007) Mary’s House: New & Selected Poems by David Craig (Idylls Press, 2007) Some Heaven by Todd Davis (Michigan State University Press, 2007) Apropos of Nothing by Richard Jones (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)   IS THERE a contemporary Christian poetic aesthetic? This question came…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Tent Revival, 1957 When things get back to normal God will put on black robes and ascend to the mercy seat to judge the world, the ruined cities, the devastated hills, the living and the risen dead. When things get back to normal, He’ll open the Book of Life and read what each man has…

She is so beautiful, it is enough— her skin like milk, nipples like cherries, her hair a long night without stars. I find irresistible the blue vein pulsing above her left ankle, the green of those intelligent eyes. Everything she wants, I want, and though my mind is cleaved, my full heart can only rejoice.…

—Lord, take the stone of my heart and break it— When it comes to conversation, I like the idea of the wailing wall, scribbling a petition on a scrap of paper and slipping the paper scrap into a crack between sun-blistered stones, knowing our prayers may not be granted, but trusting the silence that answers.…