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The blithe fluency of Gorgeous Mourning—the greetings it makes, and the intricate chances it takes - is like a legacy made good. The pun of the title gorges, but lightly like the poems themselves, on the strange pieties the language plays on. It is part of Jones's artfulness in these dazzling poems to be at once utterly coherent and plausible, and wholly taken in by where the words are going. When Emerson wrote "whim" on the lintel of his study door he was reminding himself that our prosperity is in the waifs and strays of language. In Gorgeous Mourning Jones is recovering this prosperity.
—Adam Phillips
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