Opus 3

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” – James Joyce, Ulysses

“The world is led by mind” – Gautama Buddha

Opus 3 is the complete third part of W.D. Jackson’s work-in-progress on the individual and history, Then and Now, extracts from it having first appeared in a wide variety of magazines and in three selections, Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems, A Giotto Triptych and Afterwords. In the meantime, Opus 1 has also been published (2023) and Opus 2 is in preparation.

With ‘contributions’ in the form of translations, adaptations and quotations from ancient and modern authors such as Ovid, Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Wordsworth, Heine, Rilke, W.G. Sebald, Opus 3 explores in particular the emotional / physical and ethical / spiritual aspects of our lives, emphasizing and exemplifying throughout the responsibility of each of us for his or her choices and, communally, for the world we live in.

Opus 3 was one of Frederic Raphael’s 2019 TLS Books of the Year. He saluted Shoestring Press for taking on, at 494 pp., the kind of book “no sales-conscious mainstream publisher would dare to”.

Further comments were:

“Engaging with Jackson’s work 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, [the book] is important work. I have come across nothing like it. [One’s] engagement is amply rewarded: 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

“With regard to Opus 3, 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

“W.D. Jackson’s Opus 3 is an epic, a tour de force, a poetic endeavour that surpasses anything else to be seen in the contemporary literary landscape… It is unique, and the only comparable modern work is Ezra Pound’s series of Cantos – except that the poetry in Opus 3 is accessible and readable… The author shows a mastery of many styles of composition and verse-forms – the poetry is first rate.” – Kevin Bailey, HQ Magazine

“A major poem of civilization and discontents… Layered and multifaceted, … where it wins so often is in the sheer skill of the verse-making… This, like the preceding volumes, is an important addition to our cultural knowledge…” – Roland John, Acumen

“Opus 3 isn’t a pigeoned monument; indeed, it’s not so much a book as a bookshelf, and some of the slim tomes you could pick out of it are delightful in themselves… A brave, committed and – most of the time also – a very enjoyable work, of rare scope.” – Peter McCarey, The Fortnightly Review

W.D. Jackson was born in Liverpool in 1947. He studied at Oxford, and has lived in Italy and South Germany since 1972.