Love: A Test Run

By Gareth Roi Jones

This collection of poems came out of an experiment for a project a fellow poet & I are working on. The task was simple, to write a poem a day, every day for a month. 24 hours to conceive, plan, write & edit a new poem every day & email it to each other before midnight. Well, the midnight deadline didn’t always quite get met, but the poem a day did. The catch: every poem was to explore love in some form. There’s poems about true love, soul mate love, infidelity, whale love, first love, lost love, unrequited love, undeclared love, dark love, abandoned love, arrogant love, ghost love, broken love, eternal love, love-at-first-sight love, literary love, 10-second love, pure perfect impossible love, painful love, imagined love, fantasy love, universe-ending love ... & more besides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gareth Roi Jones
• Release date: Feb 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310792649

Gareth Roi Jones

Is a member of the dandylion collective, a small writers' group based in Adelaide, South Australia.He is primarily a poet, who likes to drink wine (his predilection is Sauvignon Blanc, bubbles is second preference, & is also partial to pretty much anything else - except red bubbles, urrrgh!).In 2014, he co-edited the Friendly Street Poets Annual Anthology 38; & in 2012 had a solo collection ‘Gunyah’ Healing published as part of Friendly Street Poets New Poets 17 in 2012 (along with John Pfitzner & Rachael Mead).He has been most recently published in Eureka Street & InDaily Poet's Corner; as well as poems in The Infinite Dirt, Patterns of Living, Light and Glorie, Flying Kites, dB magazine, Iron Lace & others.Career highlights include: having his poem “Many-Worlds Quantum Mechanics Vs Earth-Based Grease Monkeys” published in The Best Australian Science Writing 2013; winning Second Place & $1000 for writing a poem on a pretty obscure topic after finding a competition which closed in 6 hours that same day; & having “i thought the moon was a cop car in my rear vision mirror as i drove home late last night ...” short listed for 2012 Satura Prize.

Book preview

Introduction

This collection of poems came out of an experiment for a project a fellow poet & I are working on (giving rise to one of the multiple meanings of test run which makes up the book’s subtitle).

The task was simple, to write a poem a day, every day for a month.

24 hours to conceive, plan, write & edit a new poem every day & email it to each other before midnight. Well, the midnight deadline didn’t always quite get met, but the poem a day did. This was not for the famously challenging event NaPoWrMo (National Poetry Writing Month) but shared similar draining/exhilarating characteristics. Oddly enough, once you got over the hump, it became easier the further on we went. Some days several poems came out of the exercise – but we only shared one per day.

The catch: every poem was to explore love in some form.

I haven’t edited them overly much, just a tweak or two here & there for clarity. I wanted to keep it close to what I churned out, I mean, produced in that furiouso month. I have altered the order of several poems to make the whole have a better flow; & a couple of the poems I sent through, I have replaced with others written in that month because they felt like they fitted the collection better. I would have liked to have shuffled the order