Robert Hunter Jones spent three years as a logger in the Oregon Coast Range and two years working the swing shift in a sawmill in his hometown of Lakeside Oregon before returning to college to study literature and writing. After attending Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay, he won a scholarship to complete his undergraduate degree at Lewis and Clark College and, subsequently, a Fellowship to the Graduate Writing Program at Brown University. Jones worked for eight seasons on National Park Service fire crews, five at Crater Lake National Park, where he did research on fire effects and fire suppression, and three seasons with Arrowhead Hotshots, a type one fire crew based in Sequoia /Kings Canyon National Park. He published a series of essays in Wild Earth and Wildfire Magazine arguing for the return of fire to wilderness ecosystems and the need to reshape the role of professional wildland firefighters to meet the challenges posed by a century of widespread fire suppression. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, Fireweed, Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review, and West Wind Review, among others, and in the chapbook The Clever Man's Forest, (Traprock Books, 2011). Since 1990 he has taught Literature and Theory of Knowledge at American International School of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Books by Robert Hunter Jones:

Other poems on the web by Robert Hunter Jones:
"Dark Matter"

About Winter Garden:

"In WINTER GARDEN, everything slides toward the leaf rot and the twisted roots—the apparitions of a father, two countries, the landscapes of childhood, and the hinterlands of obsession and imagination. Aesthetics and hand tools, myth and winter light, and so much of the world's raw materials become hopelessly entangled and ultimately numinous. This book is a paean to place, a witness to the mysteries of the examined life, and a true gift for those of us who think the poet's profession is to invent a new language for a singular vision."
—Michael McGriff