Through a Gate of Trees

Foreword by Molly Peacock

The all encompassing theme in this debut collection is how a person holds the tension of opposites— darkness to light, from loss to reconciliation and redemption. In the middle of life with both feet on the ground, the poet wrestles with the realization that the ground is never stable and that life changes in a split second. The reader is led through two worlds, the geographic one—from Egypt to Malaysia from India to Cape Cod, and the inner one—entered by celebratory, riveting and dangerous poems as they move through sex, love, birth, and death.

Susan Jackson is the author of Through a Gate of Trees and In the River of Songs (CavanKerry Press, 2007 and 2022) and the chapbook All the Light in Between (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her writing has been published recently in Tiferet Journal, Lips, Paterson Literary Review, and Nimrod International Journal. She was awarded a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grants to the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Pushcart nomination, and recognition from the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.  During the summer, Jackson coleads a group in “Poetry as Spiritual Practice.” With four grown children and two granddaughters, she and her husband live in Teton County, Wyoming.

The Man Who Could Not Talk About the War

He grabs her arm, seizing her from sleep
at three a.m. Don’t move.
There’s someone here. Next to us.
She looks into the darkness
then again to his face, filled now
with transparency, carried back
to the jungle, to the ambush.
It’s a dream, she tells him.
We’re all right. Go back to sleep.

He sinks back to silent breathing
until suddenly he flings his arm
across her shoulder. Stay where you are, he shouts.
This place is full of mines
.Help them, help them, but she cannot
see the bodies or hear the sounds they make.

She lies in the narrowness
of one side of the bed,
touching his hand until light
seeps through the window across the contour
of the no one who is there.
Waking, he reaches for her
and turning to him she thinks
of the things that can be shared:
a table, a bed.

Through a Gate of Trees is about the mental discipline it takes for a social being to insist on the difference between social bonds and being bound . . . The poems take place all over the world, yet wherever they are, the situations are domestic, and the stanzas flood with memory, with obligations, and with the dilemma of how to recognize what exists underneath the pleasant surface of things . . .
— Molly Peacock

Brilliant. Beautiful. Written with wit and wisdom. The poems are sensual, serious, witty and deep. I highly recommend it. I can’t praise this book enough.
— Marjory Bassett, Chair of the National Arts Club Literary Committee

Located exactly on the sharpened razor’s edge of vision … so fine, uncompromising and exacting a gift …
— Deena Metzger

“I thought I had pierced / the world’s secret language / with my broken stick,” Susan Jackson writes, describing her younger self. Now the mature poet does just that in these perceptive, well crafted, and deeply felt poems.
— Linda Pastan

March 2007
70 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-02-0