The Body and the End of Time : Poems Selected and New, 1985–2025

Comprised of poems selected from eleven previous volumes and accompanied by work from the past half decade, The Body and the End of Time represents the distilled evolution of one of the most fluent, generous, and embracing voices to emerge in American poetry since the Vietnam War era. Prophetic in the tradition of William Blake and Walt Whitman and equally suspicious of received wisdom, Rodney Jones is a master of discernment and revelation, driven by an urgency to bring language and witness to the sudden erosion of the local, the obsolescence of the homegrown, the erstwhile mysticism of the makeshift. Redefining the boundaries between narrative and lyricism, "Classical revision and Romantic improvisation," high and low culture, logic and dream, Jones creates an inimitable full-spectrum poetic vision in a world that has little use for poetry. By turns elegiac and celebratory, provocative and playful, these are love poems dedicated to places and bonds, to manners and accents, but most importantly to the people—the dreamers and farmers, road pavers, running backs, waitresses, and shade-tree existentialists—that form the distinctive music and texture of the American South.