Jill Jones has given many interviews about her poetry where, inevitably, an interviewer asks her, ‘What is Australian poetry?’ In one of my favourite quips, Jones says, ‘Is it only Australians who worry about what is “Australian” poetry?’ Related issues are addressed in her pithy foreword to her second volume of new and selected poems, Acrobat Music. She states, ‘I realise, and others have said, my work doesn’t fit easily into a specified school, category or type of Australian poetry.’ This provides a fortifying manifesto to her oeuvre, reflecting Jones’s interest in ‘the possibilities of the poem … form, sound, connotation, address’.

Acrobat Music includes poems from Jones’s thirteen books of poetry published between 1992 and 2020. She states that the impetus for the collection comes largely from the passing of the time (Jones is now in her early seventies) and that, like many significant Australian poetry books, almost half of her published volumes are out of print.

She is also aware that poets in Australia generally receive little public recognition. She has commented: ‘In working as a poet, the most challenging aspect is to readjust your thinking about the reception of your work. In other words, to accept there is little or none, especially in Australia.’