While it's true that most remarkable American poets are infinitely more difficult than Rodney Jones, it does not follow, therefore, that Jones is not remarkable. Unless you think that new poetry cannot be narrative (in the old-fashioned, spell-casting, consecutive way) and cannot be accessible (its action intelligible at first or second reading), Jones is a poet worth taking very seriously indeed. There needs to be a poet a lot better than Mary Oliver or Ted Kooser writing "accessible" verse, the sort of thing you could recommend to your cousin at a barbeque and, the next day, teach in a seminar for majors. Jones seems to me the best accessible poet writing in America.

When Jones writes (in "The Work of Poets") "Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?" he's written a perfectly intelligible English sentence and described a perfectly intelligible human sentiment; yet he has also, at the same time, echoed some of the most affecting lines in all of Rilke, from that poet's "Requiem fur eine Freundlin." I won't quote the Rilke, but I will say that, as with all really effective allusions, the predecessor text becomes our algebra, our way out of mere esteem. You feel esteem everywhere in Jones—for phrases (the engine of an old truck hung "from a rafter like a ham"), for cadences ("The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying"), for turns of thought:

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-
person,
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don't even exist.

—From A Defense of Poetry

But esteem is not enough. If you go to poetry for jokes, for phrases, for stories, you'll love Jones; but if you go to poetry to see all the meaning-making technologies of language (jokes and stories included) questioned very sharply, on human behalf, within the very modes that they interrogate, you'll like him, too. How many poets satisfy both kinds of reader? The few weak poems in this book (a poem called "Sacrament for my Penis," for example) reveal how deeply this poet thinks elsewhere about the colloquial mode within the colloquial mode. It's a poetry that's full of stock characters—the drifter who intuits Kant, the stripper who sounds like an oracle, the country-fried philosophe—but it has terrific fun with its clichés, and it thinks nimbly about the fun it is having.

— Dan Chiasson