Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems

by Richard Jackson

In this collection of canzonieri, Richard Jackson improvises on the themes drawn from the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch.

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

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Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each day is the deer that flees into the shadows,
that seems so fragile it never occurred, never began.
Each day a few cloudless hours begin to tow
the past across the sky’s memory.
*
How blind the stars were, how blind the moon to hope
anything would remain.
*
for I had forgotten how your leaving made a desert of all time.
Still, I have loved even this: that I can feel how Hope keeps pace
with Desire, can feel each dream, each bit of life I can steal
from Love's pockets, even as it turns, sentencing me for this crime.
*
Love is death— and there’s no end to the ways it can kill.
Your words are fallen angels, your sighs like the sea’s undertows,
so that my faith burns, my desires drown, and every sign you send
pushes me like a refugee who has forgotten even the name for will.
*
Inconsolable soul, putting hope in stars with no owners,
why do you still set the fires in which your dream is burning?
*
Even tomorrow's sun, lost on the other side of the planet, has no future.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this when it first came out, after attending a Jackson reading. The idea of a series of responses to Petrarch appealed to me. I'm an admirer, though not a scholar, of Petrarch. The explanation was that these were to be seen as riffs on corresponding Petrarch sonnets, and there is a listing in the back of which poem riffs which sonnet/canzoni/etc..

I read a few of the poems, and then the book sat on my shelf for 13 years, which is probably below average settling time on my unread shelves. Now that I've taken it up and read it cover-to-cover, I must admit to being a bit mystified. I decided to read the poems as poems first, with the plan of comparing the new to the originals later.

The language of some of the poems is contemporary in spots, there is jargon and slang, but it is mostly couched as translated Petrarchan language. It scans and sounds like Shakespeare and Donne, with the archaic language, archaic grammar, and the sentences piled clause on clause. References are often Classical, the diction as well. And some of the poems work quite well, in that context. I liked "The Ruins" "The Collapse" "The Trailhead" and the final half-dozen seemed clearer and stronger than the rest.

The subject matter is Petrarch's yearning for Laura, updated. This speaker exhibits a despair that passes beyond clinical depression to suicidal thinking. He sometimes hints that he drove the Love away, sometimes that she is dead; it could be read that he mistreated the Love; it could be read, even, that he killed her. The Love is treated as an addiction, and there are all the lies and hints of lies that go with addictive personality. That's an interesting take.

It's also relentless, and I wearied of the constant lament and self-hatred, and could only read a few poems each day. That's also a problem for a reader of Petrarch these days. One feels the urge to shout, "Get a life, for crying out loud!" if you read too many of the sonnets in succession.

I had two problems with the collection, which can easily be attributed to my feeble mental powers and limited aesthetic understanding. The lesser of the two has to do with the connection to the source material. After I'd finished, I checked a few (only a few) of the poems against the source poems listed in the table at the end. In every single case I could not see any visible connection. If riffs, they seemed to be riffed so riffingly as to be unrecognizable.

But my primary problem is that I didn't care for most of the poems as poems. Jackson piles clause on clause and simile on simile, but not in what I understand to be Petrarch's manner, in which a metaphor is elaborated and made more and more convincing. Jackson seems often, instead, to treat simile and metaphor as association-of-ideas, so instead of increasing clarity we get what is technically mixed metaphor. For instance, from The Kiss:

....No wonder that my lungs have seemed to fill with owls
searching for prey in the darkened woods of my own heart, that my thoughts
leave this pitiful trail of words leaking from under the mind's shell,
praising her beauty, her keyboard soul, imprisoned though never caught.

If a student handed that in to me, with its at least four shifts of POV in a single sentence, I would call it arrant nonsense, and overwrought past the breaking point.

It is clear that Jackson is quite skilled in poetics and language. I assume that I may be missing part of the intent, which is why I'm dissatisfied. But, for me, the results were often far too precious, far too tightly wound, and far too self-indulgent to be effective as poems, standing on their own.

[Daphne · Rating 1 out of 5]

it's really not my kind of thing.......