Moving through the mountains, birds and woodlands of Vermont, and the intimacy of a bedroom and a marriage, the varied landscapes of Didi Jackson’s second poetry collection, My Infinity, are engaging and surprising.
Jackson’s poems are full of noticing, of seeing and making meaning of small things otherwise ignored. Often, as the title of the first poem suggests, the goal is to “witness” the world—the birch leaves she describes in the opening lines, bangles, foxes, the snow—as the speaker brings us into each setting or state: a hike, a season or a migraine. The titles function to orient us and give us information that lets the poems spark into specifics with a clear grounding of context and place.
In its second section, the book explores the imagined voice of the abstract Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Jackson embodies Klint, using her paintings as a launching point to interrogate obsession, history and gender; she then moves into conversation with Klint, as another speaker responds to Klint’s paintings. The sense of dialogue and the use of color beautifully and effectively convey movement in these poems.
By the end of My Infinity, Jackson’s world is more personal, and grief, joy and love come even more strongly into the poems. The images ricochet and hold beauty, linking together with a sense of line and sound that pulls the reader into the text. The collection builds a vocabulary of image and place, and the smells of the mountains, the colors of a painting and the sound of birdsong each take on additional resonance as the poems unfold. This wonderful book lingers, inviting the reader to see in new ways.
