Customer Reviews

March Book (Grove Press Poetry)

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My kid bought this book for me as a father's day present, and I only just got arround to reading it. I have to say, it's kind of tough. There were a lot of words I had to look up. But I feel like there's something in Jesse Ball's writing that isn't about it being complicated even though it is. He just has to write what he has to write, and now we get to read it. The best one of all is the last one in the long block. I don't know where he thought of it, but I read it twice, and I don't usually read poetry.

One can see the world through many lenses. I would choose the eyes of jesse ball to show me the world every day of the week.

This book is the real thing, a manifesto written by a master poet. Don't be deceived by Ball's youth. He is a veteran with a careful eye and a quick trigger finger. The most remarkable section is the Numbered Column.

You will happen across Jesse Ball's poems in a trunk in an attic, folded carefully in a silk scarf, watched over by implacable maidenforms. It will happen. You will unwrap it, this perfect curio, this well-made old thing that suggests the time and the land that made it with such a force that you cannot help but know yourself as irreparably damaged. That is, you will want to die and go to the place where Jesse Ball's poems come from, even as the poems themselves acknowledge over and over the impossibility of such an arrival ("As if it were possible, this life with bees.") It is a terrible thing to have to say, and a terrible thing to have to read--this revelation of life as unresolvable longing, as one long encounter with the ache of a perfect line like "Please let prayer be true" or "I swore... we would live without a doubt, in grace," lines that destroy hope even as they express it, leaving you with "fragments that couldn't possibly add up to anything."

But you cannot turn away from it, because the process he describes--that of coming continually into the proximity of one's own imagination, finding freedom, losing it, falling awkwardly back into life, and coming back again--this "pulse and gather" of memory as he calls it--is life, more than any adventure or struggle or drudgery or moral code or years passed dandling a child on a knee. Any artist who does not begin from that point is not making art but mere "badges of their difference." Jesse Ball sets himself apart from these, calling himself not a contriver but a "machinist," and with March Book he has indeed created a machine, a device of torture as fearsome and beautiful as Kafka at his best--but he has also, as Kafka before him, earned the right to your attention by first lying down in it himself.

One of the best new poets is the only way to describe Jesse Ball. I have met him in real life and the way he talks about his poetry is amazing!

The March Book is incredible and unforseen, as any great book must be. Not since "Lord Weary's Castle" has a poet been heralded in such a fashion by the work itself. Just as Lord Weary's Castle astounded not by innovation but by consummate skill and breadth, here we see Jesse Ball triumph in the sheer strength of his imaginative powers, in the sheer clarity of his delivering thought. The poems here function fundamentally on the level of thought, winding in and out of various conceptions, various intents. What elevates this book most of all however is its philosophy of careful hope; hope set against weariness, betrayal, suffering. This may not be a new argument, but no one else is couching it as Ball is, in a theater of such implacable momentum.