Heralded as her most personal collection of poetry yet, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving (Hub City Press, 2025) dazzles with its power and beauty. With innovative forms, profound themes, and a fierceness tempered by sensitivity, Jones addresses many topics. Given the title, it is no surprise that poems about grief dominate the collection, with many poignant verses about the death of a much-beloved father. Yet grief for her father is not the only topic—among the thirty-nine splendid poems in Lullaby for the Grieving, Jones tackles spiritual matters, healing, the strength and comfort of community, the enduring nature of love—and even joy. The poems are intense, musical, vibrant, visceral, and glorious.
Poems of political grief convey the burden of Black history—from the Middle Passage, the Underground Railroad, the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama, march, and more—with references to civil rights icons such as John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Fred Shuttlesworth, as well as a series of verses celebrating Harriet Tubman. Jones does not flinch from what she confronts in these verses. With lines such as “no slavemaster will see the pearly gates” in “All God’s Children Got Wings,” Ashley M. Jones does not let her readers blink or look away.
Lullaby for the Grieving is Jones’s fourth collection of poetry, and she is the first Black Poet Laureate (and the youngest) for the state of Alabama, serving from 2022 to 2026. Several of the poems mention Alabama. For example, in “The Heart,” Jones takes on the Alabama slogan that once adorned its license plates—“The Heart of Dixie”—when she writes:
Dixie is a body, and we are the heart of it.
…
God pulled us all from that same dirt—
our bones know the earth’s first anthems,
and those melodies fortify us.
Alabama—an innate melody.
In a sonnet called “Freedom Sermon—Alabama, USA,” Jones pays tribute to the late civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis as well as the “Blessed freedom fighters who unfix the / chains and prison bars.” She writes: “John, they heard you speak God’s word—the right man / for the job … / the thing you cannot bury is the light.” In yet another poem titled “I Think of You, Alabama,” Jones marvels at the state and “the way you defy the harsh touch of man / and bloom anyway.” With her words in “On My Way to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I Think of My Father,” she honors the bravery of those who suffered brutality at the bridge in Selma during what has come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” She acknowledges, “There is something in the memory / of protest called fear.”
One of her poems with an experimental form, “Map of the Capitol, Montgomery, AL, USA,” is laid out horizontally across two pages in the book as if it were a map or timeline. In the right margin of the second page, a group of nine connected haiku completes the poem. In the timeline section, Jefferson Davis “cradled the confederates / in Montgomery,” near streets with auction blocks for slaves. Yet after a poetic collection of historical references in this complex form, Jones’s final haiku concludes:
the sharp traffic of
so many intersections
and my voice cut through
While many of her poems are written in free verse or as prose poems, and with a generous sprinkle of sonnets, Jones also utilizes more exotic—and far more difficult to compose—forms, including a villanelle, an acrostic, and a heroic crown of sonnets. With excellent control and precision, Jones displays her remarkable skills in these various techniques as well as her talent for conveying hard truths in verse. Her acrostic poem “What It Really Is” opens the collection with lines like “Cameroon is a whisper in my blood.” Ultimately, true to its acrostic form, the first letter in the first word of each line spells out “critical race theory.” This poem asks: “When does a / theory become a threat?”
In her villanelle, “Grief Interlude VII,” she returns to the dominant theme of the collection—grief for her father, Midfield, Alabama, Fire Chief Donald Jones, who died unexpectedly in April 2021. In the style of a villanelle, she repeats the first and third lines of the opening tercet throughout the following stanzas, concluding with those lines in the closing quatrain:
I haven’t been myself for three years.
More often, forever, I’ll wake up in tears
Her heroic crown of sonnets, titled “Snow Poem” and dedicated to her father, is no doubt the masterpiece of Lullaby for the Grieving. It is an extensive poem comprised of fifteen sonnets in which the last line of one sonnet repeats as the first line in the next, until in the heroic crown all fourteen of the repetitive lines come together to form a final sonnet. “Snow Poem” is simply an incredible poem, both because of its complex structure and because of the tenderness and love expressed so well in its lines. As Jones writes in this poem: “Not everyone can know a father’s love.” Yet this poem illustrates with grace and honesty that Jones was fortunate to be one who did know a father’s love.
In the title poem, “Lullaby for the Grieving,” written at the Sipsey River in northwestern Alabama, Jones finds healing in nature. She writes of “small steps, like prayers” and “the slip of a rain-grazed rock” and the “golden butterfly / against the cave dark.” She writes, too, of angels—“what else can i call the crown of light / atop the leaves?”
Yet for all the tenderness and beauty in that title poem, “Lullaby for the Grieving,” perhaps the most tender, loving, and loveliest poem is the last one in the book. “Imagine Us, In Love With the World” is “a story about love. About peace.” It is a poem in which the poet wakes to the sounds of her parents “as they sipped coffee and settled into the morning / of their love.” In cherishing that moment where she witnessed her parents together in the morning, Jones holds that love “against the sharp, swift scythe of loved ones lost,” and concludes the poem and the collection with this perfect tribute:
The way that moment is sealed inside me.
The way it protects me still,
coating me in my worthiness,
bathing me in their love
It’s hard to do justice to any book in a review, but a book of this beauty, power, and importance makes a review only a pale attempt to convey something of its worth. Readers are, thus, encouraged to delve into this collection, to read, savor, and experience each poem in Lullaby for the Grieving for themselves.
Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones is the first person of color to become the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022–2026) in its ninety-three-year history. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University and is the author of three prior poetry books: REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021); dark // thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry; and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), winner of the silver medal in poetry in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, Jones is the associate director of the University Honors Program at UAB and part of the core faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She is an activist and a native of Alabama.
Leave a Reply