eyes that look with sun but see with moon by Jack Greene

Jack Greene brings the master photographer’s eye for the instant to language. Allen Ginsberg’s first teaching to me was “it’s easier than you think: look out your eye like looking through a window.” Easier said than done. It takes time to master the moment. You love the poets you love to think with. That’s the extent of it. All the rest is valentines. I’ll be reading Jack for a long time.

–Steven Taylor

Jack Greene is a poet of condensed lyric irony, light (sun and moon) and tender memory. The child’s fear of “trees sprouting out of rocks” leaps out, as does the “simulacrum” deer behind museum glass, suddenly alive, nose moist from “a drop of shellac.” Animation reminiscent of Williams Carlos Williams’s glittering green glass shard in the dirt behind the hospital, animated by light and by noticing what’s tangible is always celebratory.“Vermeer’s Aquarium” is a gem, as well, where we sit “like pilgrims at a shrine” and witness depictions of art-mind, as with Proust and Joseph Cornell who continue in their hermetic practice as wars come and go. There are quiet poems honoring family, a hypnagogic cinematic image of a mother’s wedding veil unraveling in a light beam and the “father’s foot/a constant/song” which is the rhythm and a glow that remains with you in the reading of these singular poems. Kudos for this poet’s truth.

–Anne Waldman

In eyes that look with sun but see with moon, Jack Greene’s words come like meteors into the darkness. Behold our humanity, illuminated and elevated by these bright poem-lights streaking across the pages of this collection, precise in their economy of diction and style, but profound in their resonant permanence within the reader. While wholly new and of this time, Greene’s words arrive to further a tradition populated by the ancient Asian masters, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Anselm Hollo, and many other greats. The poetry world has been improved by this gift.

–Matt Hohner