Love Leans over the Table

Description

‘This book invites us to consider issues we may find either unthinkable or reflecting a set of values and beliefs we do not share. However, the openness and heartfelt honesty of this invitation makes the poems irresistible. Varied in form: single stanzas longer than a page, couplets and quatrains, prose poems and a diary, they sparkle with inventive language and images… Overall, a rich, distinctive collection, it had me thoroughly gripped.’ – JENNY HOCKEY, in Orbis

‘The depth of Jackson’s painstaking research, her eyes-wide-open image making, her facility with other vocabularies, her allusions to other texts, and her fellow feeling for the mystic tradition make this collection a rare and magnificent thing.’ – KATHRYN BEVIS, Poetry Wales, Winter 2023

‘This collection of passionate, life-affirming poems goes straight to my favourites shelf. It was a pleasure to read this book where every poem is a pure belter from an accomplished and engaging voice.’ – ANN GRANT, Writing in Education, issue 90, Winter 2023

‘Jackson examines the lives of women (including her own) with compassion and pride, celebrating the woman who ‘stands on her head so she can know the rush/of emptiness.’ ‘Love Leans over the Table’ is a probing, adventurous collection, each poem pushing towards the unsayable, finding its song.’ – ROBERT HAMBERGER

‘This is a truly an exceptional collection; Rosie Jackson is in full control of her language, tone and form. A lifetime’s experience is found within these pages, and it’s matched by a lifetime’s honing of her craft.’ – CHRISTOPHER JAMES

‘Fine poetry that is at once both scholarly and accessible; the poet’s gift with words underpins a literary richness that makes reading the collection immensely rewarding.’ SARAH McNEILL, the Meher Baba Association newsletter

‘No other book of poetry I have read has engendered such visceral, spontaneous reactions in me.’ PAUL BIRCHARD, the Meher Baba Association newsletter

‘Love Leans Across The Table is Rosie Jackson’s finest collection to date. The vision and craft of a poet at the height of her powers open doors to the seeker in all of us’ – GRAEME RYAN, The High Window

‘It is, perhaps, courageous, in this secular age, to engage so fully with the numinous, but Jackson challenges us to look beyond the obvious and temporal and to celebrate all of life’ – ALWYN MARRIAGE, London Grip

‘Here is faith and doubt, awakening to life’s trials and imperfections. There is longing. Jackson is not afraid to name desire, fear, or need. She is not afraid to look.’ – JANE BURN, Ink Sweat & Tears

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.