Winter Is Not My Country by Marianne Jones

Winter is not my country

Winter is not my country builds on Marianne Jones’s skills as a humane and meticulous writer of highly crafted lyric poetry, deeply rooted in a sense of place as well as exploring themes of aging and death, landscape and language.

The collection is wide ranging, but coheres around these recurring themes, examined with subtlety and control.  The poems are honed and precise and the work is always accessible, but nonetheless profound and moving.

Marrying a sensibility of global concerns with rootedness in Welsh landscape, this is an intelligent and mature collection from an increasingly confident poet.

Praise for Jones’ poetry

– Throughout this collection of sharply focused poems, there is a sense of journeying – of pilgrimage. However, what primarily characterises this collection is its quiet music with elegiac strains rendered sonorous. Especially strong are those poems that explore the theme of impermanence and change, yet many poems suggest a hunger for the permanent – the eternal summer – and this creates a bitter-sweet tone. These poems pay repeated reading – there is more to them than at first meets the eye – balancing the personal with the public, the spiritual with the material, and language with silence.

Fiona Owen

Marianne Jones was born shortly before the end of World War 2 and grew up on Ynys Môn/Anglesey, where she now lives with her husband, an environmental campaigner. After completing a first degree and qualifying as a teacher, she lived and worked abroad for several years: in Kyushu, Tokyo, Vancouver and Montreal. When she arrived back in Britain, she worked as a lecturer/teacher of English as a second language and later as co-ordinator of Japanese educational projects. She completed a second MA (the first was in Montreal) and a postgraduate diploma in multicultural education. Her first collection, Two Blue for Logic, and first novella, Ring of Stones, are both published by Cinnamon Press.