Retrievals

by Richard Jackson

Praise for Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson has extended both the noble body of contemporary poetry as well as its planetary horizons. His lyric sensitivity resembles the smooth flow of a deep river. The surface reflects quotidian events from touching emotions and inspiring landscapes to horrific political crimes but deeper down there the real Dantean drama draws one in the abyss of Promethean empathy and powerful ethical dimensions. His is the poetic beauty and the subtle touch of a man of incredible poetic expression and planetary conscience.
—Iztok Osojnik

Richard Jackson has become one of our most important poets. His subjects are those for which poetry originally came into being. The essentials are his songs, his precepts, his adoration, his companions. It isn’t any simple solace he offers, but it’s solace nevertheless that he lends us.
—James Tate

I think he is either Hermes or a Sorrow. He is certainly a messenger. And what he says is contained in a single word, although it comes out as amazement, anger, joy, sadness in an astounding cascade of images, and a variety of tongues. He is a poet of great sweep and vision. He is a master of music; one of our finest poets.
—Gerald Stern

He is a kind of Scorsese in poetry, but where Scorsese almost succeeds in his films, then stops, seals and terrifies us, Jackson adds a tender, vulnerable voice that blossoms and transforms us and that is so unique and great, great in its truest sense in Richard Jackson’s poems.
—Tomaž Šalamun