Elizabeth Jacobson's New Book Eerily Instructs

Julie Marie Wade considers Not Into the Blossoms and Not Into the Air (Parlor Press, 2019), a new collection by "an essential poet's poet," Santa Fe-based Elizabeth Jacobson. The book "feels eerily instructive for me at this particular moment in my life," writes Wade. More:

...As I read, I half-expected to turn the page and find one of Jacobson’s luminous epistolary poems addressed directly to me. When the book arrived, I was feeling especially fragile, helpless in the face of so much devastating world news. I have been trying to figure out how to live more kindly and wisely on behalf of my fellow humans and the planet we share, struggling to determine what this would look like on the smallest daily scale. I’ve been slowly converting to vegetarianism over the last year, for instance, and spending more time in the natural world—listening and appreciating, trying to step lightly on the face of the world, trying to replace guilt with gratitude, trying to replace helplessness with helpfulness—trying, of course, which also means failing. At the same time, I have been reading Basho and Sei Shonagon for a seminar in hybrid forms I’m planning to teach in the fall. And I’m also seeking to celebrate a long marriage (seventeen years in June—five of them legal, all of them sacred) and sing my own body electric into its fortieth year.

In Not Into the Blossoms and Not Into the Air, what do I find? A poet-speaker struggling with helplessness, with witnessing pain, with inflicting pain, too, with losing beloveds, with confronting death in all its forms. This poet-speaker is writing to Basho and Sei Shonagon, is celebrating long marriage and the new invitations and permissions that come with age. This poet-speaker is, above all else, reckoning with the world as we knew it, becoming the world as we know it now...

Read the full review at The Rumpus.