Learning to Jump
Imprint: Resource Publications
76 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.15 in
- Paperback
- 9781666784572
- Published: October 2023
$10.00 / £9.00 / AU$16.00
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Learning to Jump seeks what sustains us during troubled times. Across a range of spaces, from the ancient Celtic ring forts of the Aran Islands, to an artist's studio, to an old woman's dressing table, these poems attend to urgencies too often neglected in the press of everyday obligations. Here are celebrations of making and of things well-made, expressions of gratitude, and acts of preservation, along with meditations on those befores and afters defining peoples' lives: a child loses a front tooth, a poet takes religious vows, a man dies of a heart attack in the street. To counter the pain of grief, these poems discover--in a hummingbird feeding, in a goat giving birth, in wind heard through dry stone walls--images of beauty and mystery that connect us with nature and each other. Whether focusing on how to cut boards with a handsaw or paint in egg tempura, make chicken soup from scratch or read Ulysses to pieces, this book also honors skills passed on and hard-won habits that enrich ordinary days with meaning. Only by paying such scrupulous attention can we trust our many leaps and the ground we land on.
Sean McDowell is professor of English at Seattle University. He is the author of Metaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry (2022) and the editor of the John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne.
“Learning to Jump is a book full of character, color, and intimacy. Sean McDowell is a poet who illuminates the bonds that lightly (so lightly we hardly notice) hold us together and keep us from falling apart. Here we wander with a wanderer, a scholar who has left his library, and we travel far, from Seattle’s Pacific Northwest to rain-soaked Connemara in the west of Ireland, to explore what might be gained or lost along the way.”
—Tony Curtis, author of This Flight Tonight
“We have long celebrated Sean McDowell’s many achievements as critic, teacher, editor, and executive director of the John Donne Society. This book demonstrates his impressive poetic gifts. He has an ear and a mind and a heart for sound effects, for precise and often surprising words, and for startlingly original images. Many poems explore details of the natural, everyday world, where, in these moving lyrics, the secular and spiritual interact and intersect.”
—Heather Dubrow, chair in poetic imagination, Fordham University
“Learning to Jump transports the reader to ‘a place / that is no place and every place / at the heart of heartfelt melody.’ At the heart of the poet’s heartfelt melodies, you’ll find several achingly beautiful love poems. This is a wonderful book with fresh poems you will return to again and again with deepening pleasure. There’s a daring newness, too, in how Sean McDowell uses plain, direct speech. I applaud the new possibilities he brings to our time.”
—Greg Miller, professor emeritus of English, Millsaps College
“Under his poet’s gaze, the small and common things of the world ascend into Sean McDowell’s nearly reverent attention to be simultaneously affirmed as needful in themselves and expanded into resonances beyond themselves. As McDowell urges his reader, over and again in a variety of ways, to ‘Look closely,’ so he enlists us in the extraordinary work of being enthralled by the ordinary.”
—Kimberly Johnson, author of Fatal
“There is a peculiar state we enter when we’ve read a good poem, a sort of ‘post-poem’ reverie, eyes unfocused, turned inward, a letting go of barriers, allowing whatever might come to go ahead and change our lives. Reading McDowell, I find myself in this welcome condition over and over. He combines the discipline and patience of an internationally acclaimed scholar with a sensibility that recognizes the difference between poems that can be written and, like these, ones that should be. I love this book.”
—Samuel Green, author of Disturbing the Light
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