Brian Jones

Who was Brian Jones?

Brian Jones was a British poet. He was educated at Ealing County Grammar School for Boys and Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Jones' first major collection, Poems, was published in 1966, and proved to be successful. Those poems dealt with both the joy and the unease that may be present beneath the surface of what seems to be placid middle-class domesticity. This was very much in a style popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and Jones was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in a 1970 anthology of post-war British poetry as "certainly one of the very best practitioners of this overworked vein". Subsequent critical assessments of his work have included the following:

"Jones believes that poetry need not surrender to fiction all the stories that need telling, but his poems retain the tightness of verse and the authority of good cadences. There is as much truth to surface detail in his work as in any recent novel, with a good deal of eloquence added." – Peter Porter

"It is his concern with truth-telling that unifies Brian Jones’s work and gives The Island Normal its strength, a poetry austere without coldness and colloquial without slackness. Why is he so little known, so rarely discussed?" – Grevel Lindop