Welcome back—or welcome for the first time. In this monthly newsletter, I’ll share and discuss a great poem, and offer a reading recommendation.
Last month was “Pale Colors in a Tall Field” by Carl Phillips.
This month I spent some time with “Thinking of Frost” by Major Jackson. The poem appears in his latest book, the dynamic collection The Absurd Man—which is my recommended book for this month.
Let’s start with an earlier poem from Jackson, which offers a useful preface for his impressive work. When the narrator of "Blunts" tells his friends that he wants to be a poet, one responds: “So, you want the tongue of God.” It's a statement, not a question—in more ways than one.
When asked about that tongue of God, Jackson has said poets “have long meditated the inexplicable, mysterious aspects of human existence,” and that to a certain extent, “the poet is responsible only to their own swirling through the cosmos, but his captured, stylized self, his lyric expressions, become emblematic of our own.”
Jackson’s poetry accomplishes this: affirming his own brilliant vision of the world, but inviting us to join his meanderings.
Now let’s consider “Thinking of Frost.”
“I thought by now my reverence would have waned.”
I love this first line! The focus on the possible; encapsulating past and present in a single phrase. I like how “waned” makes me think of celestial things, a kinesthetic cue to “reverence” that permeates the poem. This recalls the grandeur of the word “awe,” and I wonder if we still allow ourselves to do just that: wonder.
The narrator thought his awe for the world would be a vestige of youth; that he would have grown blasé with age (like Carl Phillips from last month, Jackson is excellent at considering the arc of existence). He feels “unrestrained joy” when he sees “a black skein of geese voyages like a dropped / string from God slowly shifting,”
Joy: what a word. I always think of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his exclamation points, his preternatural syntax. Jackson moves along that route as well, the syntactic and emotional control here is strong as we turn from decayed apples in an orchard to cornstalks. “I will never soothe the pagan in me,” the narrator interjects, “nor exhibit the propriety / of the polite.” He’s “loud this time of the year, / unseemly as a chevron of honking.” There’s a feral, ecstatic, feel to this moment of the poem—and I think it gets to the best of what poetry (words arranged with the finest care!) can offer us: a ritual of seeing.
The narrator becomes the “fire in the leaves,” both spirit and person (“obstreperous as a New England farmer”). He ponders the fear of children “who walk home from school / as evening falls like an advancing trickle of bats, the sky / pungent as bounty in chimney smoke”—the poem’s lines bounding up and down, reverent and unbound.
I feel similar energy in another poem from the book, “Vermont Eclogue.”
Among the mountain fog, as day turns to evening, there are “country roads clamoring for sleep.” The gentle snow—“patient as an assassin”—falls, and “mists your car.” Then we move indoors: “African masks with half-closed eyes / on a living room wall seem disoriented.”
The fog, the tiredness, the melancholy, the mist, the disorientation: Jackson does an expert job of turning and spinning these together to create the meditative moment. I like Jackson’s careful attention—such attention is itself an affirmation—of paddock-crossing moles, blue jays, white pines, distant peaks. The narrator sings along to The System (a clever, unmentioned nod to “in another world” in the song’s lyrics!): “Your voice its own woodland.”
Check out Jackson’s fine work. Then go find your own woodland.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next month with another poem and book recommendation.
Be well.