Winner of Marsh Hawk Press’s First Annual Poetry Prize, 2004
Jacquelyn Pope: Watermark

The air of the poems in Watermark is alert and energized. This is a morning freshness that lasts, because it contains opposites: both fluency and integrity, both riddling surprise and entranced spell-binding. Jacquelyn Pope has remarkable ease and power, especially in using tone and diction to establish an imagined world, eloquent and various. No irritable straining after effect here—each poem is a distinct experiment in bringing ardent mental life out into the light of day. Listen with pleasure to this new voice.—Marie Ponsot, Judge of the Contest

Watermark is a book of spells, prayers, and hauntings. It describes its own compressed language: "crossed double-crossed underscored" in dreamscapes writ in rain, wind, mist, and harbor water. Tact and mystery marry in these glintings of loss and of life recovered from ruin. Jacquelyn Pope is fearless in her art, and
has no need to raise her voice. —Rosanna Warren

When the phrases dance, as they do in Jacquelyn Pope's Watermark, as if they hear their own tune, you know a real poet is singing out-raising the roof as her awkward Alice does in the too-small house-raising a welcome ruckus of rich imaginings and sounds.—Gregory Orr

Pope's innovation is in her language—kinetic, hyper-alliterative, here mild and susurrous, there blazing with pith and zip—and the intelligence with which she portrays genuine hurt.—Maggie Dietz, Harvard Review

Jacquelyn Pope's first book of poetry, Watermark, coheres: her voice is mature, and the tone is strong and even throughout.her poems are at once recipes, whose ingredients are carefully selected and kept words, and the spicy, savory, or even sour meals that those words-cut, stirred, and simmered-create. —Emily Taylor Merriman, Verse

Pope's deep understanding of the economy of language that poetry demands creates work of unusual and original beauty, poems that read as if they were borne whole, though every thoughtful reader will know they required vision, talent, and extraordinary and effective effort. —Sima Rabinowitz, NewPages.com

Watermark is an undeniably melancholy, haunting, and accomplished collection of poetry. Pope's use of language is fine-tuned, clear, clipped, concise and most of all evocative. —Doug Holder, Chiron Review

ISBN 09759197-2-5 $12.95

 

The Good Wife

Old book, old broom, a penny’s pleasure;
stuff run in rings, around and round.
But rounder still: be light, be leavening,
true as time. You can’t make a box
from a broken arrow. You can’t keep
faith and flower. Pretty is as
pretty does, but pretty doesn’t
do without. The rest make do. Tasked,
contrived, you’ve been left to gloom back,
bulk up the rear. In your fog heart,
from your faded eyes you’re an exile,
confined to locked doors and lost time.

Goodbye to All That

Goodnight, goodbye,
I undo all I've said and done,
this life unlived, depending,
all the evenings spent upstanding
(wallflower, dormouse, doorflower)
given the same going-over
no matter how scarce, withdrawn.
No matter the shifts from side
to side, the sworn elisions,
swallowed sighs: they read me
the riot act, loud-mouthing words
I learned by heart. And learned
it's luck like this, disguised
as luck, that's led to life
in corners, days declined.
Now my days are done for—
I turned, X'd them aside. Time's
worn through, and I've resigned.