March Book
Encyclopedia
American poet Jesse Ball's first book was 105 pages long and called the March Book. It was viewed well critically and it helped to build the foundation for Ball's subsequent reputation as a poet. The book was published in spring of 2004 by Grove Press
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Eamon Grennan
, Irish master-poet, wrote of March Book:
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
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Eamon Grennan
Eamon Grennan
Eamon Grennan is an Irish poet born in Dublin. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He was the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004....
, Irish master-poet, wrote of March Book:
Various in subject matter, consistent in their control of voice, at home in memory, fable, parable, the poems in March Book add up to a mature, surprising and extraordinarily lively first collection. Jesse Ball's imagination is at once mordant and playful, inhabiting and populating its world with a mixture of enigmatic observation and direct speech. He stands where the true poet should, in his properly vulnerable position, his motto: we are near a truth and daren't speak. Like a fractured prism, his poems dissolve the self into other voices and remote situations, each one a glittering shard of some unspoken truth that offers itself resolute outside the haze of his own life. There is, however, nothing hazy about the work, informed as it is by a verbally honed, sharply pointed steadiness of purpose. 'In these unruly days,' he says in one poem, 'even prayer may be true.' Combating unruliness with their curious mixture of surprise and formal grace, the poems of March Book insist on their own kind of truth, and are their own kind of oddly angled prayer.