Razzle Dazzle – New and Selected Poems 2002–2022

A pre-eminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes. The volume opens with over three dozen new poems that erupt into full-throated song in the face of indignity and invite us into a passionate experience of the world. Taken together, these two decades of writing offer a sustained portrait of a poet “bound up in the ecstatic”, whose buoyant lyricism confronts the social and political forces that would demean humanity. Jackson possesses a sensibility at once global and personal, driven by an enduring conviction in the possibilities of art and language to mark our lives with meaning. These dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice and accountability.