Things That Happen Once

Rodney Jones writes: "These poems issue from the touchstones of my life: the powers of childhood, the stoical relationships of men, familial and sexual communion with women, the kindred lives of animals, the creation and embodiment of myth - and finally, the wish to evoke the sources of present attitudes and behaviors. Thus, the book opens with poems of beginnings and change, of things that only happen once: the first highway crosses the frontier; the first television set arrives in a rural community; a child sips his first Coca-Cola, meditates on the first space travel, comes to his first suspicions of religious orthodoxy. What ensues is a record of individual consciousness as it emerges from sometimes brutal encounters and close relationships and comes to occupy the full fabric of an adult life. 'Elemental Powers,' the culminating section of the book, documents a further awakening - to sexuality, to appetite, and to the need to define and live in the presence of earthly beauty. While all of the poems are unabashedly topical, both in the sense of belonging to a particular place and time, and of referring to contemporary issues, their main governance has been lyrical. My ideal has been to unearth certain fragments of the buried past that might otherwise be lost, and to portray them as lucidly and memorably as possible."

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.