Opus 1 [W D Jackson]

Opus 1 is the complete first part of W.D. Jackson’s work-in-progress, Then and Now, of which the
third part, Opus 3, was the first to be published (also by Shoestring), in Nov 2018.

Neither Romantic nor autobiographical, but “unrepentantly subjective”, Opus 1 starts off the work’s
poem-by-poem creation of an “imaginary identity” (J.L. Borges) in the process of attempting to
understand the nature of his (or anyone’s) place in history – in particular our freedom or lack of it in a
world of growing materialism and repression, in which exchange value, not truth value counts, and
short-term self-interest (the Buddha’s tanha) motivates not only individuals but greater and lesser
political and cultural groups.

Opus 3 was one of Frederick Raphael’s TLS Books of the Year (2019). Other critics wrote:

“One thinks of something which Dryden famously wrote in the Preface to his Fables… surveying the
range and variety of Chaucer’s achievement, he observes, ‘ ’Tis sufficient to say, according to the
Proverb, that here is God’s Plenty’… ‘Plenty’ or abundance is not always or necessarily a virtue
where poetry is concerned. But when poetry is as generous and as disciplined, both technically and
intellectually, as Opus 3 is, it deserves to be welcomed without qualification.” – Glyn Pursglove,
Poetry Salzburg Review 34

“[Reading Opus 3] is in itself a literate education. It is also a philosophical one: there is a seriousness
… which pushes almost all of his work in the direction of a further engagement with ethics… Taken
as whole, [Opus 3] is important work. I have come across nothing like it. Jackson’s metrical and
lexical skill is often as entertaining as his thought is profound… He is a master of prosodic structure.
Like some of his colleagues, Villon, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Jackson is able to align a highly
constrained line with the cadences of the spoken voice…” – Chris McCully, PN Review 25

W.D. Jackson was born in Liverpool in 1947. He studied at Oxford, and has lived in Italy and South
Germany since 1972. Opus 1’s cover art is a view of the Walker Art Gallery by Arturo Di Stefano:
William Brown Street, Liverpool (1994).