Alive All Day

by Richard Jackson

The rhythmic flow in Richard Jackson’s poems—happy, dreamy, passionate and even cruel for the way it raises our hopes only to thwart them with the truth, and which opens the kernel of memory—immense bontee and responsibility in it all, immense lust—is at the same time possessive and healing. The reader feels as one of the Chinese soldiers buried alive, turned into terra cotta with his emperor, sewed into the radiant remembrance of the author’s youth and life and dramatically loving it. Why? I guess compassion and generosity is so inclusive. Everything touched here becomes carved and firm, thus relieving. Alive All Day reminds me of the best of America. And of a gothic cathedral.

—Tomaz Salamun

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

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Reviews

[Edita]

He would sit there each night, more alone than the invisible
stars.
[...]
Across the piazza a violinist is playing for coins,
playing as if to cover the cough of the moon,
as if he were tending the wound of some distant star.
*
my love, how wonderful to have lived while you lived,
which is not the sort of poetry you read anyplace anymore.
*
[...] bits of ourselves
we lose each time we turn away. Now we hardly know
anymore what beginnings will hold our stories together, do we?
*
The dust is already settling in my dreams.