The Tough of Love is a book of poems about love and death and the dark night of the soul. Wonder and horror, resurrection and faith. A mythopoetic journey of psychospiritual development; from childhood loss and emotional turbulence, our inherent relationality and its difficulties, to the fruits of well-earned maturity. An expedition into the depths and dimensions of being to understand the true complexity of reality, and a work in service to the love that made it possible.

“During the fifteen, sometimes turbulent, years of the growth of this collection, Jamie Jones has recorded her engagements with the shaping forces bringing her inner life to consciousness. ‘Creating a self that is strong enough to sustain us and carry us through life is an ongoing process’ she writes in her introduction. That ongoing process, often assisted by poetry (‘when I am lost throw me to the pages’) is captured here.

‘Out of this world we can spin a chrysalis,’ writes Jamie, the voice of experience, emerging and singing of her journey to ‘places in us/struggling to be heard.’

The poems are often down-to-earth-blunt (‘tough it out…How else is there to craft a soul?’) but they are also full of Jamie’s wide and varied experience of the lyric, from Joni Mitchell to George Herbert, which pulls in and sends out sparks shooting in multiple directions. And yet the experience is always grounded and useful, ‘saveful’ as she says, of the act of reading:

remind me of poetry – tell me
to read something shaped to rescue
things that seem too sunk to be
redeemable – offer to read it with me.

Down-to-earth, blunt, practical and yet here is also wild imagination – see Not the Bayeux Tapestry, see String Theory, see the elephant emerging from the egg in Elathimaira.

Strong thoughts, deep feelings, and always, Jamie’s deep commitment to finding reality and telling truths about it, so that life might be felt more:

Calling myself blessed I feel our heart beating
in the hours touched with fire – Jane Davis, founder of The Reader Organisation.

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