The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice.
Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood - riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped.
As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference - places, people, politics and importantly, language.
The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned - it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery. Dream spaces where language is forever in play.