Love Leans over the Table

Description

Passionate and affirming, the poems in this collection have at their heart an intense hunger for life, not only this side of death but after. Celebrating both human and divine love, they trace a path from personal loss to spiritual struggle and eventual epiphany, finding echoes in the vividly imagined experience of various mystics, including Rabia of Basra, John Donne and Simone Weil.

‘What it means to parent and be parented, to love or be loved, to feel grief or be filled with faith are questions that Rosie Jackson examines in this extraordinary collection. There is a restless energy and a searching intelligence at work here – creating startling, moving poems that explore the porous, shifting boundary between the historical and the contemporary’ – KIM MOORE

‘In these honest, eloquent, compelling poems, Rosie Jackson enters all the realms – physical, emotional, mental and particularly the spiritual – as the collection unfolds. Her evocations of the lives of the mystics are a rare pleasure. Love Leans over the Table confirms Jackson as a searching, accomplished and necessary contemporary voice’ – MONIZA ALVI

‘The extraordinary thing about Rosie Jackson’s poems is that she is so utterly present in all of them, her voice lit up by a “joyful shining.” The whole book brims with life and energy and it really is quite wonderful’ – JENNY LEWIS

Rosie Jackson. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 100 pages, April 2023.

About the author: Rosie Jackson is a widely published poet and creative writing tutor living in Devon. She has a first-class B.A. Hons degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Warwick, a D. Phil. from York, and has taught at the Universities of East Anglia, West of England, Nottingham Trent, Skyros Writers’ Centre, Cortijo Romero and many community settings. A Hawthornden Fellow in 2017 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2021, Rosie has won numerous awards and has collaborated with other poets, artists, sculptors, musicians and film-makers. She has worked with the creative arts in health care, and her spiritual life has taken her to India and the United States.