I can see that many poems are strong. There is a restless energy also
in the stone gardens.... I want to see this book printed. I am convinced
the interesting and good stuff dominates. I think you can contribute to
the awareness of stones and ice in a new way. (I am very fond of your
"Black Ice".) Your photographs were wonderful.
Tomas Transtromer, Vasteras, Sweden 17 April '87
From the book:
BLACK ICE
For my father
Once in a sunrise revelation a childhood
before snow
only on the chosen of bays
the deepest lake
will freeze
to glass—black ice
the surface
of space—too fast for iceboats
lifting off
too thin in the moongroans
thundering underneath
threatening
to remember: games with the boy I was
opening my arms
sailing
on skates—the late geese keening
skeining low
toward the steaming blue deep
their strange
soothing sounds—
geese mate for life—
their cries
their calls
almost ours
On reading Tom Jones’ first collection of poems, No Prisoners (Skeptic Magazine Press, 1976), Archibald MacLeish (also a poet and lawyer) wrote to the author: “You have that rarest thing in the modern world—an ear. And you have been where you have been, which is the next rarest.” More than one hundred of his poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, including The Nation, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.
After twenty-two years teaching, writing and living on the Navajo Nation, in June 2014 Mr. Jones retired from teaching and has since devoted himself to both poetry and photography with the creation of his TOM JONES PHOTOGRAPHY website, tomjonesphoto.net; publication of BEYOND EXISTENTIALISM; and juried selection by nine different jurors of four color and six black and white photographs for nine juried fine art photography exhibitions.
