Article

D.G. Jones

Published Online November 27, 2008

Last Edited March 29, 2016

Douglas Gordon Jones, OC, poet, literary critic, editor, translator (born 1 January 1929 in Bancroft, ON; died 6 March 2016 in North Hatley, QC). After earning a BA at McGill and an MA at Queen's, D.G. Jones taught English for more than 3 decades at L'Université de Sherbrooke. Jones ranks among the major lyric poets in English in Canada.

Douglas Gordon Jones, OC, poet, literary critic, editor, translator (born 1 January 1929 in Bancroft, ON; died 6 March 2016 in North Hatley, QC). After earning a BA at McGill and an MA at Queen's, D.G. Jones taught English for more than 3 decades at L'Université de Sherbrooke. Jones ranks among the major lyric poets in English in Canada. Furthermore, his work as a translator and as the co-founder and editor of the literary magazine ellipse: Writers in Translation has been vital in making poets of English and French Canada mutually intelligible.

Although chiefly inspired by rural Ontario and Québec, D.G. Jones's work is not "nature" poetry, but rather a Taoist meditation on language, love and art whose roots are in Archibald LAMPMAN as well as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. One of the crucial aspects of this poetry is its development from a central Canadian "garrison mentality" to neo-romanticism, expressed in the leitmotif of Jones's well-known book on Canadian literature Butterfly on Rock (1970): "Let the wilderness in."

D.G. Jones's early books of poetry include Frost on the Sun (1957); The Sun Is Axeman (1961); Phrases from Orpheus (1967); and Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth (1977), for which he won his first GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD. A Throw of Particles: New and Selected Poetry was published in 1983. Jones won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 1988 for Balthazar and Other Poems and again in 1995 for The Floating Garden. Grounding Sight was published in 1999.

D.G. Jones translated (with Marc Plourde) many French-Canadian works, including Embers and Earth: Selected Poems of Gaston MIRON (1984) and The Fifth Season by Paul-Marie LAPOINTE (1986). Jones won the 1993 Governor General's Award for his translation of Normand de Bellefeuille's Categorics one two and three. His translation of Émile Martel's award-winning For Orchestra and Solo Poet appeared in 1996. D.G. Jones was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007.