“I never understood, nor enjoyed most poetry,” he writes. “So I never considered myself a poet … even while writing poems. However, I have always enjoyed words. I’m fascinated by how they can carry innumerable shades of meaning. … Each word is a seed containing a tree of human thought.”
Those seeds blossom in “Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023” ($15 in paperback, independently published). Over 45 years, beginning after high school, Jackson penned words that capture a moment but open up into larger vistas, illuminating “who we all are, where we have been, and where we may go.”
Loosely organized into four “seasons,” Spring considers words, love, and lust, Summer is for shadows of light and dark, Fall contains “Treasured Ash” in poems for Paradise, and Winter heralds a journey toward “good grief.” “Grief,” the poet claims, “is not a rest along the way./ You’re not meant to live in despair./ Grief’s never meant to be a place to stay./ Grief is about continuing to care.”
The Appendix is a children’s story, with Jackson’s own sketches, called Mark & Cathy and the Meaning of Life, a tale about misfits who fit.
The poet knows something fitting: “Darkness falls./ Yet, the sun miraculously rises bright./ Heaviness calls./ Yet, one is not so easily made light./ A secret:/ Gratitude defies gravity.” The poet is grateful for “Table Mountain Wildflowers” which “Tuck themselves in to the tune/ Of songbirds in the evening hours/ Serenading a stoic moon.”
Some poems here evoke smiles, others reflect deep theology. “Fear is/ A certain kind of faith/ In dark uncertainty./ Love is/ The certain kind of faith/ In light risen from adversity.” And: “No matter how logical or critical/ Love is personal, not political.”
“Only an unchanging God can truly say ‘I AM,’” Jackson writes me. We, on the other hand, continue to change: “I’m a question waiting to form./ I’m an aging man unborn./ I’m becoming but never will be./ It’s only a stepping stone/ In what you call me.”
