Heartwall

Richard Jackson

I have a thing for difficult books. I have never been sure why this is, but the books that rank among my favorites every year are often those that I find well-night impossible to get through. Case in point: Heartwall, Richard Jackson's slim (sixty-eight pages) volume on which I spent a total of thirty-seven days.

The language here is clear, precise, and exceptionally thick. This is not a book for casual reading. But like the best difficult books, the reward for picking your way through the verbal forest is often immense, and wending your way through a Richard Jackson poem, especially in this volume, is never less than pleasurable:

...Occasionally, you can hear
the whispers of mollusks, the air in the hawk's wing.
How is it possible to describe any of this?
Fish dream of a moon that rests on the water
like a lily pad, and that moment is enough.
(--"Possibility")

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It will definitely be on my top ten reads of the year list for 2005.