LIGHT MAKES IT EASY
Light Makes it Easy
Moniza Alvi writes of Light Makes it Easy: 'These are rare, nourishing poems, open and vulnerable, spiritually aware and with an acute sense of beauty and struggle.’
And Tessa Strickland says: ‘Award-winning poet Rosie Jackson is in her element with her latest pamphlet. Richly informed by literary and spiritual antecedents, these poems are also completely themselves – both modern and mystical, intimate and universal. There’s a fearlessness at work here: ‘…perhaps its time at last/to write that letter as appendage to your will,/say exactly where you wish your books/art//ear-rings/body to go…’ There’s also a fullness of vision that holds, seemingly without effort, life in one hand and death in the other….
There is an enduring elegance about the poet’s voice that will bring you back with joy to re-read many of the pieces. ..If I could only choose one of these poems it would probably be Hildegard’s Remedy, with its ‘memory of warm bread, the comfort of a kitchen where love/holds the ladle’, and its promise that Hildegard’s remedy will take its effect, that the man who is being treated ‘will smile for the first time in months, will pluck a blade/of grass taller than his hands, put it to his lips and make it sing.’ (Ink, Sweat and Tears, 2022)