Navigating Major Jackson’s poetry collection, RAZZLE DAZZLE, is like reading A Jedi’s diary reflecting on experiences and emotions across the galaxy.
Review by Cid Galicia
“RAZZLE DAZZLE”
W. W. Norton & Company Publication September 2023
288 pages
IBSN 10: 1324064900
IBSN 13: 978-1324064909
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
–– Jedi Master Yoda
I still consider myself an apprentice of the art.
–– Major Jackson
What happens when you encounter strong universal forces: infinity, eternity, the dark cloaked one, oracles, narcotic dreams, devils in choirs of fire, natural elements, and love? You may ask to Let Me Begin Again. You may feel the need to skewer all your prayers and slow-roast them in the open air. You may find yourself hearing The Sound We Distress For, and find yourself Thinking in Swedish or Speaking The Language of the Moon. In all cases, the journey through Major Jackson’s poetry collection, RAZZLE DAZZLE, is like reading A Jedi’s diary reflecting on experiences and emotions across the galaxy.
In this collection, your mind will transform into a syntactically radical, time-travelable starship. You will start in the present with the first stop being a newly developed cluster of poems titled: Lovesick. Following that, you will return to the year 2002 with poems from Leaving Saturn. Then you’ll jump forward to 2006 with poems from Hoops, 2010 with poems from Holding Company, and 2015 with poems from Roll Deep. The final destination on this journey that encompasses over 20 years of poetry is a selection of poems from Absurd Man, released in 2020.
Each section of this collection is worthy of reading again and again; however, this review will focus mainly on the new work in Lovesick and Urban Renewals.
One of the most compelling qualities in these poems is the grace, smoothness, and emotional depth of the language. Jackson’s diction is magical throughout. The following are a few of the recurring elements and images: Prophet, Infinity, Dark-Cloaked One, Prayers, Eternity, Salvation, Orpheus, Believers, Oracle, Fountain, Mercury, Narcotic-Dream, Church, Infinite-Light, Faith, Fire, Devils, and Reverence. Almost every poem is brimming with mystic and metaphysical language.
In each, someone, or something, is reaching in search of the sacred. The human experience captured in these moments is often heavy, mundane, and focused on suffering. The additional verses in Urban Renewals is especially honest about the imbalance and poverty in our nation. All of these poems elevate the “everyday” to a plane of cosmic significance.
In many cultures, text is often a conduit into the something else, something deeper, if we can just alter the lens that we look through. Here Jackson offers language to help us bridge the gap into this place through the experiences of his past. He is a Poetic Jedi Master guiding us—his apprentice readers—to a deeper connection with ourselves and each other.
The words infinity and church appear more than once in these poems, not as a specific archetypal focus on Western culture, but on the universal ancestral connection language offers. It connects the reader to their expansive potential.
In a few poems, Orpheus and Mercury also make appearances in ancestral tones, exploring the terrains of life and death. The speaker guides the reader into the depths, and by the end, both re-emerge bathed, cleansed perhaps, through song and experience.
Having lived in New Orleans, Jackson understands the power of the lyrical and rhythmic in the living force and he acknowledges his plight as a “seeker” in the poem The French Quarter.
Over powdered beignets
over demitasse chicory
near Royal, I came to grips I am the lonely sort,
for I am ever seeking…
Of course, a noteworthy aspect of this collection, and all of Jackson’s books, is his ongoing work titled Urban Renewal. Rather than a single standalone poem, Urban Renewal is a sprawling sequence of numbered poems that Jackson has added to throughout his career. Acting as a recurring narrative and stylistic thread, it includes elements of study, observation, protest, and sometimes serves as a call to arms against the Galactic Empire.
As a poetic providence, it is an echo of rebellion across the universe and “the ethical obligation we have to the communities we claim.”
In closing, whatever route you take as you navigate the poems in this stellar collection, you’ll discover places, experiences, and states of rebirth in a Galaxy [not so] Far Far Away…
May the [poetic] force be with you.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
You can follow him on Instagram @poetmajorjackson
RAZZLE DAZZLE is available from W.W. Norton.