The Language Game

By Timothy Emlyn-Jones

These poems are an invitation to play―to discover something new in this sandpit of a brutal world. George Orwell said no book is apolitical, and this one is no exception in seeing play as the core of creative process: the means by which we can be liberated and saved from our neglect of possibilities.

Timothy Emlyn Jones draws on his experience as an artist in treating language as a medium, like paint, through which it represents itself as much as what is portrayed. He paints in words, takes a line of words for a walk, collages images, and invites the reader to cut up the pages and throw the pieces in the air to complete the last poem in this book. The sounds of Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, the playground and the bike sheds, the conversations of County Clare, as well as Welsh cynghanedd and Dylan Thomas may be heard in the syntax. His themes range from passion to politics, death, and the limits of meaning. Ghosts of modernist literature and art may be seen lingering in the company of his words.

"Rejoice, ReJoyce greatly, that this shining treasury of multiple possibilities, of new open forms beyond formalities, is suddenly to hand."
from the Introduction by Michael Horovitz

"Original, playful and very inventive, The Language Game is timeless."
Elaine Feeney

"The Language Game is a breath-taking and mind-bending journey into the wizardry, music and mad science of language. A bubbling cauldron of brilliant ideas and experimental form playfully executed to perfection--each poem shimmers with its rejoice in the spell craft of poetry. No-one else is writing like this in Ireland."
Stephen Murray

"Timothy Emlyn Jones's The Language Game is, particularly in the Irish context, an exceptional work of poetry. He is a poet profoundly influenced by a particular version of experimental poetics... But he also has a fundamental grasp of poetic form, which he uses in a most playful way. In common with other experimental poets on these islands, Jones knows that language is a means of ideology, and not to be taken at face value. Unlike many of them, he knows other things too, such as what "monetarism" was. He absolutely gets my vote."
Kevin Higgins

"It's great to see really original work getting published. At the heart of this thought-provoking volume is a concern that words are too often used to obscure truth. Fortunately, the poems engage with this in a playful, compulsively readable way, providing unexpected moments of sweetness and warmth. A rich and original collection."
Susan Millar DuMars

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1915022762
• ISBN13: 9781915022769
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Length: 88 Pages