Dale Jacobson

Comments about A Walk by the River (published 2004):

 

I've come to conclude that Dale Jacobson's A Walk by the River is a 

masterwork, which I won't undo with the usual quibble, "minor."  It

is as it is as no long poem has been since Thomas McGrath's lovely 

Letter to an Imaginary Friend-- a trek to define identity without the tricks 

of rhetoric, without reliance on a particular time or tradition, and 

with only suggestions f the bare edges of rough science, and so an 

exposition of the lineaments of self, the lone walker along a river 

that leads, over a period of personal desolation, to questions at the 

heart of the organizing power of personality-- justification, 

self-congratulation, evasion, aging, all joining hands.  The reach of  

A Walk by the River is for a rest from that.  The rest is pursued with 

excoriating patience until life songs lift up, and the dark valley and 

chasms of existential defeat are spanned in the manner of a leap of 

faith.  There must be love, the narrator seems to discover, in a kind 

of starstruck wonder:  "the seal's wide, spindrift gaze toward 

paradise," as Hart Crane put it.

     It's a book all manner of people should read.

        --Larry Woiwode, Poet Laureate of North Dakota

 

Dale Jacobson’s A Walk by the River is a masterfully written poem, full 

of depth and resonance, and quintessentially American.  The poem’s 

current pulls you in and sweeps you along on its spiritual journey.  

This is a river that can take its place proudly beside Williams’ 

Passaic, Twain’s Mississippi and Thoreau’s Concord and Merrimack.

        --Robert Hedin

 

“I cannot imagine my own annihilation.” said Walt Whitman, but Dale 

Jacobson imagines this very thing in language that Whitman would have 

loved and in ways that he would have cheered.  A Walk by the River is 

filled with metaphysical musings, inquiries into mortality, and memory, 

but this Dante does not descend into the underworld for answers;  he 

stays under the stars, on the banks of a discernibly Midwestern river, 

trusting his own imagination to carry him on, endlessly.

        --Joyce Sutphen

 

One of the central and most generally-averted themes of our times.

        -- Jack Beeching

 

  “the lovely Jacobson poem, a meditation with a current like a river, 

and a weighing of things in all our minds (whoever "we" are)."

        --W.S.Merwin (in letter to publisher)

 

Regarding Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast:

 

Dale Jacobson is a poet of lyric praise and political vision.  Like Tom 

McGrath, Jacobson’s late friend and mentor, he comes to his topics 

growing up and working in the farms and canning factories of the great prairie 

of the northern mid-west.  If there is a politics in his poetry as there is in McGrath’s, 

it is as spiritually suffused with nature as William Blake’s, as imagistic 

and allusively argued as Neruda’s, and as American as a coyote on a hilltop 

outside town waking us up with his lyrical, plaintive song.

        --John Balaban

 

Throughout Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast, Dale Jacobson speaks for 

the unspoken, the victimized, the disillusioned, and does so eloquently, forcefully, 

in a voice filled with beauty and moral indignation.  Metamorphoses is finally 

about hope and, like all good poets, Jacobson forges a compassionate pact 

with the world; it is one that in the end sustains and confirms– the poet's life, 

ours, and the great healing powers of the language.

        –Robert Hedin

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