Shared Spaces by Roger Jones

Roger D. Jones‘s Shared Spaces, a brief collection, reflects a personal cosmos of dynamic poetic knowledge, with verbs urging one through the interstices of these rich portraits and landscapes. These poems are equally emotional as they are intellectual, with metaphors often drawn from landscape, a profound knowledge of nature, and memory. And though all is transitory, Jones’s poems offer perspective: “you see: before, the center / was nowhere particular. Now it’s the whole field.” The lush and studied beauty of these poems transport, educate, and inspire me. These are valuable poems that I will revisit again and again.

–William Wright, author of Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems, Series Editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology

If Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, and Basho farmed the same acreage, Roger Jones would fit in perfectly with them.  These masterful poems engage the true selfhood, pure dirt honesty, and incredibly deep human presence of the poet, his family, and other people who know and work the land.  In Shared Spaces, the unique expression of artful directness and humility weaves a fabric of profound sharing between people and nature in each poem.  You feel like you know these people because they are human enough to be in your own blood.

–Robert Randolph, Professor, Waynesburg University, Fulbright Scholar, Floating Girl (Angel of War); The Appalachian Archive; Broken