Do Not Peel The Birches

Do Not Peel The Birches

“The poems in Fleda Brown Jackson’s second book . . . exhibit the kind of present-tense clarity one associates with Elizabeth Bishop . . . . To read these poems is to look through a newly washed window; the world is strangely bright and, at the same time, frighteningly familiar. This is a difficult effect to achieve—one that only succeeds when it is not an effect, but something effortless. In Jackson’s hands, effort is invisible.”

—The Georgia Review

“When domestic poetry reveals the profound and the esoteric, it does so in a circuitous way; but when it does it is moving and, sometimes, terrifying. Fleda Brown Jackson is face to face, in these domestic poems, with the wildness, whether she is swimming with an old aunt or waltzing at the Pappy Burnett Pavilion or remembering her father taking her retarded brother sailing. A culture is revealed here; and a brave vision.”

—Gerald Stern