Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Wind shadow Jill Jones Terra incognita transfers across a plain, a wing blends the graces, tarmacs, macadam, concrete being so concrete, the tar-sick travel. And hills make effort, rock, shrug, years of it, as now we turn between cities. Traction in floodwater, levels, blue slate, trees, red hollow, millennia forms feral, forms survival, trail of goats, their black edges, hesitation on the road, emu too, scrabble, kangaroo switch to flight, twenty-one birds of prey, without prey, dwelling along bright white civilised lines, carrion mess, moon, and milky way, brutal shoulder, bloody, in wind, in shadow, uncertainty, a kind of thinking, all there, no matter what you dream, how uncomfortable, this is where it happens, this is where it passes, a thunderclap, a creek bed, falling branch. ‘Return to find a river,’ to be faceless, this once, off the grid, no identity, no thought but in itself, going out of no paradise, ‘where does memory live?’ To hear crows, thoughts pass, ‘you blew it’, the pace, hurry days, in skirl, in concentration, ‘return to the living body’, let the nothingness enter, keep swinging in a body, your own laboratory, work, push, and don’t push, off centre, centre. Smell grass, cow pats, new asphalt, let’s be doing. Jill Jones Jill Jones lives and works on unceded Kaurna land. Her latest book is Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia, Canada, Ireland, NZ, Singapore, Sweden, UK, and USA and has been translated into a number of languages. She has worked as an academic, arts administrator, journalist, and book editor. More by Jill Jones › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.