The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning

Richard Jones’s seventh book is the work of an artist whose intense commitment to poetic craft is matched by his extraordinary capacity to witness and chronicle the details of domestic life and assert that there are “cherubim lingering by the illuminated / bins of produce, / seraphim protecting the fish sticks / in the frozen-food section.” Jones says: “I trust language. I want to be clear. I believe poetry is a ‘temple of words.’ I try to keep it spare and elemental.” This transformative belief in “the correct spelling and exact meaning” of the world and the word resounds in the pages of this book—a luminous hosanna to the paradoxes and pleasures of existence, a hymn of our desires for redemption and salvation.