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Selections from Vol. IV...
Fiction
Poetry
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Echezona Udeze
Maryn Ellery
The Ampersand Reviews!
CRACKS AND SLATS
Mark Jackley
chapbook, Amsterdam Press, 2009
Review by Danny Lawless
Mark Jackley
chapbook, Amsterdam Press, 2009
Review by Danny Lawless
Mark Jackley’s remarkable chapbook Cracks and Slats offers the reader many pleasures, not least is its straightforwardness: a flatness of style that conceals – though not very well – its author’s immense gifts of style and nuance. One hears many echoes here – of Simic and Michaux, Strand, Ponge, the early Robert Bly, Nicanor Parra, George Trakl, a bit of Franz Wright, even the prose of Wille Vlautin. Jackley is a master of the apercu, if one can apply that high-falutin word to these memory-narratives of family and dogs, houses, a man eating a burrito in a movie house, of shit jobs and love-making. Here a spruce is “a shy dancer/holding the hem of her dress/on the verge of leaping”; a divorce decree arrives “in the iron stillness/of the mailbox whose/mouth was hanging open/in the April breeze/ much like mine”; and, my favorite, the lover who dreams of he and his partner as two clementines “nestled in our crate/ of wood and nails, the plastic/netting is the end/of the world/ exactly/as it ought to be.” Ordinarily, one is happy to come across even one such passage in a poet’s work. Here, there are others, equally uncanny, equally spare and haunting, like this. Many others.