Those Summer-Soothing Days

Previous comments on David Jaffin's work: On Light Sources and Landing Rights: "Decidedly prolific bite-sized, brief, crisply restrained and profoundly philosophical." The Chicago Review "Jaffin's Through Lost Silences offers a rare display of manifold poetic variety. Succinct and challenging enforcers of new insights and deeper understanding, his poems soar in far higher realms than those of prosaic description and rational analysis ... There is sincerity and conviction in Jaffin's crisp, multi-sensory poeticisation of ideas. Existential and philosophical shapings of language, simple and complex at the same time, draw out the true nature of his chosen subjects in an original way overwhelming the faint echoes of older poetic traditions and leaving behind profound aftertaste of experiences lived through for the first time." -Edward Batley (University of London) "David Jaffin is a scrupulous weigher and weighter of words - by which I mean that a poem is, for him, always a matter of collaboration with the true spirit of the language. Every word is given its value, neither more nor less." -Edward Lucie-Smith "David Jaffin's Preceptions is a fine book. Jaffin's poem, slight on the page, entice, engage, amuse. Yet their brief touchings often reach wholeness, and they are poems of philosophical consequence out of keeping with much of modern poetics. The poems catch perceptions in the act of happening, to be, the short-line verse appropriate to what becomes." -Paul Ramsey, The Sewanee Review "Jaffin's poetry is as 'modernist' as abstract painting while still poetry in the traditional sense, whose purpose is the verbalization of basic human experience and whose form derives from a serious exploration of language ... it is remarkable what depth of experience Jaffin manages to relate through his severely limited vocabulary and imagery." -Victor Terras (Brown University)