An important presence in Welsh publishing and poetry, John Idris Jones' new and selected, Accord, spans his writing from the 1960s to the present.

That's John Idris Jones - ploughing his lonely furrow, conveying subtle truths in simple language. Elsewhere he has written, 'The sky is quiet with distant birds.' Beat that. Herbert Williams
...his eye always sharply focussed on some telling detail, his mind keenly inventing images which are charged with the poem's essential meaning. Indeed, I marvel at some of Idris's images - ...phrases of remarkable precision that create the impression that one is there looking. ...this is pure poetry, a pleasure to read and re-read. Zulfikar Ghose
Some poets write whether they have something worth saying or not - the elderly Wordsworth comes to mind. Not John Idris Jones. Each of the beautiful poems in Accord, a collection of 56 poems written over more than half a century, commemorates something extra-ordinary in the ordinary world. That indeed is one of his special talents: seeing in the apparently banal its deeper significance.
Another striking feature is how much he can find that is positive in life - an unusual feature in modern poetry - from deep and lasting love for his wife Denise who leaves each day a better time to be, in `My Love,' to the celebration of what remains of the dead despite our sense of loss, for example, the image of R.S. Thomas placing his body in the wind and by the crooked trees / in man's mistrust and nature's non-forgiving, in the opening poem of the collection. There are moments when Few things are fitting / except silence, as John Idris Jones states when contemplating the terrible Aberfan disaster, or implies in `Passchendaele' when remembering his gradual realisation of the horrors his father had experienced in war but had never talked about directly. But in the main these are poems of resilience, and this is summed up by the end of `American words,' after he has contrasted his childhood fascination with names like Kentucky and Chattanooga with the bleak adult reality of steeping down from a bus in the Mid-West at 1.45 in the morning: Facing my future, / I had lost my past. / And with what vigour remained / I reached for my suitcase / and walked. The vigour survives the disillusionments and tragedies of life right up to the final poem, where he celebrates the bilingual culture he has been lucky to experience: In this dual stream, my mind was made, / and as I have two arms, eyes and ears, / so the duet of language plays on, / joined, harmonious, / as one. -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press