1 post tagged “american language”
Read Hoops straight through. It will get late. You will need sleep and you will not put it down. It's addictive like Lahiri, seriously. Major Jackson has given poetry readers the gift of invention within form with his second book of poems, Hoops. In his "Letter to Brooks" he uses rime royal - with a nod toward Auden's epistolary poem to Byron - and a palpable love for his mentor to take on pop culture, poetic elitism, adolescent anti-elitism dragged into adulthood, our political landscape, and "All the turf battles. All the war games."
There is a line in one of Jackson's poems about wealth and being shown things that recalls a Hemingway quip:
"There are two things you can do to help an artist: give him money
and show him stuff." Jackson shows us stuff and he has earned every dollar that the publishing world might want to hand a new poet.
I cannot recommend Major Jackson's Hoops highly enough. It carries the reader like a novel, keeping our American language alive and true. Hoops is a slam dunk.
