Arlene Swift Jones, a poet, memoirist and educator, died at home in Bloomfield, Conn. on December 31, surrounded by her three daughters and granddaughter. The cause was sepsis, following complications from peripheral vascular disease.

As the wife of a foreign service officer, Jones lived in Germany, Poland, Cyprus, Norway and Switzerland, with spells in Greece, Lebanon and Israel. From 1959 to 1962, Jones was the principal of the American School in Warsaw. On her husband’s retirement in 1975, the couple returned to the states to live in New Hartford, and Jones worked as the assistant academic dean for the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn.

Jones had many friends in Norfolk. She and her husband owned a house on the village green, “Cricket Hill,” in which they never lived, and which they sold in 1993. They lived in Colebrook from 1993 to 2004.

Arlene Jones was born in Grinnell, Iowa in 1928 and raised on a family farm in a Norwegian Quaker community. She attended Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, graduating in 1949, and Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in English in 1951.
She sailed to Norway in the summer of 1951 to attend the University of Oslo, then bicycled through England, France and Germany, eventually finding work with the United States Army in Salzburg, Austria, where, in 1952, she met and married Major Frank William Jones Jr. of New Hartford, Conn.

In 1987, Jones published her first collection of poems, “The Insisting Thistle.” Two others followed, “Deenewood: A Sequence,” in 2004 and “Pomegranate Wine” in 2005. In 1995, Jones earned a second master’s degree, from Warren Wilson College. A memoir of her time in Cyprus as the wife of an undercover CIA agent during the strife between the Cypriot Greeks and the Turks in the 1960s was published in 2010 under the title “God, Put Out One of my Eyes.”

She is survived by her three daughters, Jeanne R. Jones of Colebrook, Robin M. Jones of Weston, Mass., and Kristin A. Jones of New York and Rome; and by two grandchildren, Michaela and Jonathan Slavid.

A memorial service will be held on April 12 at 4 p.m. at the Licia & Mason Beekley Community Library on Central Avenue in New Hartford. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations can be made to the Beekley Library (www.beekleylibrary.org).