What isn’t immediately apparent from this excellent New and Selected poems is that Jones’s is a poetic career that falls into two halves. His first four books – Orpheus with a Tuba, The Mad Vibe, Shakti, and The Palace of Art – were published between 1973 and 1981; the next four, beginning with Blow Out, appeared in the last five years. This twenty-seven-year hiatus was devoted to fiction and a career as an activist which led to his becoming, in what must be a unique event in the annals of Australian poetry, a mayor (of Sydney’s Ashfield Council). Such a radical break from poetry should be marked with some kind of warning to readers: twenty-seven blank pages perhaps.

If there is one defining feature of Jones’s poetry that bridges this hiatus, it is the way his voice mixes the high and low. Many of Jones’s poems are located in the sordid world of street life. Early monologue poems like ‘The Deadshits’ from his second book, The Mad Vibe (1975), were particularly confronting and remain a bit shocking forty years on – no mean achievement. What is distinctive about Jones is the sense that he belongs to this sordid world linguistically and poetically.

In monologue poems, there is always a dramatic distance whereby the voice of the speaker is distanced from the voice of the poet. When I search through the book for some quotable examples of deliberate verbal vulgarities (‘It’s spring / & all those randy frigging birds / Are shitting on the trees’, or ‘when I consider / us homo sapiens saps / kissing each padded arse / I think this lonely night / we got it coming’, or ‘Doesn’t matter shit how many fights / The Champ has won’), I’m reminded that they can all be dramatically justified. But there is still no doubt that Jones, as a lyric poet, wants to widen the registers of our poetry and to prevent it from being too habitually ‘high style’.

‘Heat’, from Blow Out (2008), seems an important poem now in that it encapsulates much of this interaction between high and low. At heart it is a portrait of a bikie urinating in a back street, but it is full of ‘poetic’ context: the setting is the Sydney of the summer bushfires; the moon – that most ‘poetic’ of symbols and one that recurs regularly in Jones’s poems – ‘stares unblinking at her own reflection / In the silver black enamel of the tank’, and the final lines remind us that he is a romantic ‘rebel without a cause’, without ever using this as a way of transcending the sordid.

Running alongside and, in some ways, counter to this interest in the monologues of the streets – monologues of what a recent poem calls ‘the built world’ – is a strong sense of family dating back to Jones’s first volume. Here, the emphasis is on continuities rather than the juxtapositioning of high and low. ‘Telephone Elegy’, in Orpheus With a Tuba (not included in this selection) speaks of offering ‘lumps of memory torn out / of our dense and common heart’. The continuities of family appear in pieces like ‘Poems for My Father’ in the second book and in the poems for mother and grandmother and the two luminous poems for his daughter, Alyse, at the end of Blow Out. A recent poem, ‘My Two Sons’ sees familial continuities in terms of genes when it asks, ‘will our ancestors creep softly past / holding gifts from long ago?’

Another recurrent theme in Jones’s work is the nature and status of poetry itself, especially how it relates to the social and mercantile world, which has, as ‘A Brick & Sandstone YMCA’ says, ‘its own fractured poetry’. One of his best poems is ‘The Poets’, which, significantly, appears last in this selection (though that comes about because, like all these Selected Poems which begin with the most recent verse, we have to read the poet’s career backwards).

‘The Poets’ begins by making sure that we don’t overvalue the function of poets – ‘they speak to a vast audience / consisting mainly of one another’ – but imagines the transformative possibilities of an ordinary citizen accidentally reading one of the poems tucked out of the way in a Saturday newspaper:

... but rarely he might think
at how unreal the world has
become & how beautiful & how
soon he must leave it which is
also beautiful ...

Then, knowing himself to be ‘dwarfish, blind & ugly’, he ‘returns once again to the real’.

It Comes from All Directions should go some way to helping us answer the question of what the relation is between the two halves of Jones’s career. We can see now, I think, that, for all their power, there is something restricted in the earlier poems. They are inclined to be gritty monologues and meditations, though poems like ‘The Pier’ and ‘Flak’ from Shakti (1977) do experiment with alternative modes. By the time we get to the second half of the career, the modes have blossomed into many variations. The book’s title poem, for example, is decidedly tricky, as is the first poem in the book, ‘Fertility’, ‘there / where space-time bends / no-God is breathing’. In the political poems, there might be more humour than before: in ‘On the Path Outside the Fruit Shop’, for example, different fruit represent different members of the body politic, ending with a huge pumpkin, ‘monarch above them all’, which ‘settles his gigantic arse in a glowing orange gown / a Sun King waiting for the knife’.

But the powerful poetry with the deliberately rough edges persists across that twenty-seven-year poetic gap. Alan Wearne once described Jones as ‘one of the great unsung elder statesmen of Australian poetry’. It Comes from All Directions should ensure that his praises are, at last, sung properly.