Book Review: Passport by Richard Jones
Passport
by Richard Jones
Green Linden Press, 2025
Reviewed by Matthew Murrey
In Passport, his 20th book of poems, Richard Jones has done something sly. To readers familiar with his work, he offers some of his signature moves: spare and accessible language, a keen attention to the physical things of the world, and an open-hearted exploration of nostalgia, wonder, love, and longing while deftly managing to avoid cliché sentimentality. Consider “Our Children Now Grown and Gone” where the poet recalls winter nights at home watching movies on TV with his wife and three children:
all of us wrapped
in warm fleece blankets,
the flickering blue dark of the house
intimate and pure,
the family communion sacred,
as if huddled in the glow
of a deep night’s firelight
a hundred thousand years ago.
But Jones is restless to use Passport to travel in some surreal and unexpected directions, and he lets us know this right from the start. In “Passport,” the title poem that opens the book, things start off plain enough: “A passport is indispensable. / Some people keep it in a locked drawer.” But not this passport; the poet describes putting his “under my pillow / so I can travel in my dreams.” And like that the poem is off to Tierra del Fuego for breakfast with the ghosts of his parents where the three of them make plans for dinner the following week in Mallorca.
Though one often expects dreams to break the bounds of rationality, more poems follow that blur even more the distinction between what is real and grounded versus the dreamlike and unruly world that the imagination opens up to us. In a poem like “The Death of Ajax” Jones offers us a backyard garden where in the night a “battle’s bloodied survivors” stand guard around a funeral pyre which by morning has given way to very real forsythia bushes and dogwood flowers.
In one of my favorite poems, “Wings,” Jones employs first person understatement and simple declarative sentence structures to introduce a character who puts on a complicated set of wings every day before coming down to “work at the dining table.” The wings require “a system / of cords, grommets, straps and buckles” and make it hard to come down the stairs. They also get “tangled in the chandelier” and cause him to waste “many hours buckling and unbuckling, realigning straps.” All this is done for those occasional moments at the table when the wings and lamp overhead combine to create a situation where “a calm light / falls on my face and hands.” I couldn’t help but think of Rilke’s angels as I encountered this strange tale of an artist who strives to be like the real angels, only to realize that:
Real angels neither rest nor sleep
but that cannot be said of me.
I’m tired at day’s end and go to bed
early, glad to unstrap my wings
and leave them in the corner
next to my halo and heavy shoes.
In Passport Jones points us toward two principal means of finding and entering those realms where reality bends and swerves so that one gets to experience what I would call an ecstatic perception of reality. One of these – as the title of the book suggests – is travel, and the other is imagination set loose through the creative arts, especially writing.
Travel is the thread, indeed path is the better metaphor, that runs through the book. After the opening poem of dream-travel, there are poems of travelling by ship, visiting Sicily, driving across Texas, settling in to a small Paris hotel, and even – in the lovely, understated final poem, “Humanity” – running out of gas in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Reading Passport, I began to suspect that at the heart of this book is the idea that to travel is to live, and—conversely—to live is to travel. And so in the poem, “Travel by Ship,” advice for traveling and living abounds: “A certain amount of cash is advisable,” “it is wise to orient yourself with a compass,” and “Honor your foes with gifts.”
Passport also explores into the powers of writing itself. In “The Form” the poet playfully wreaks havoc on the dull process of filling out a bureaucratic form. He provides “a fake name and false address,” enters mysterious numbers into a rating scale, writes out the 23rd psalm instead of his social security number, and by the end has “folded the paper into a flying crane” that mysteriously is placed “between the dusty stones of the Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem. Similarly in “The Blank Diary,” the poet describes how “To fill the blank pages / I made up a rich life.” In pushing against the expected constraints of a diary – as with the expected constraints of poetry – the writer travels to Burma, performs with a knife-thrower in the circus, has brunch with Milton and ends up in a small room at a base on the far side moon where:
There were many mysterious buttons
and dials I did not understand,
but the small, white room had just enough
pale artificial light that I could open up
my diary and make the daily entries,
describing the endless sea of galaxies
that fill the universe with promise and hope.
That ending could well describe how it is to spend time with Jones poetry. If you are already familiar with Richard Jones work, or if this is your first time reading his work, the fifty-seven poems in Passport will delight and surprise you—and sometimes call you to pause and meditate on the wonders of your own life. Whether Jones is focused on common things such as flowers, windshield wiper blades, and a trampoline or imaging gardens on Neptune, a library staffed by a ghost, and a magical sweet potato that transports its possessor to the great cities of the world – the reader gets to travel along without getting lost, and on finishing the book will be like the speaker in “Poem #10,242” who “looked down with awe / on the fullness of what is.”
Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Anthropocene, Whale Road Review, Passengers, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for 21 years, mostly in Urbana, IL where he lives with his partner. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/, and he can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.
Poems from Avalon by Richard Jones at EIL
Passport at Green Linden Press
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