Praise and Poems

With razor-sharp linguistic skill, Martin Jack’s poems candidly dissect the visceral quirks and quarks, routines and ructions, of modernity’s ‘daymare’ (‘Un-Zipped’). He unstitches semantic seams to let sententious revelations unravel on the page. This poetry bites into the senses
Alan Morrison

Jack is one of those American werewolves in Brighton eventhough he was born slightly east of the place. His post-Ashbery-esque narratives have been paired down to a more personal, less elusive and far warmer lyrical voice; but his extraordinary linguistic inventiveness remains. A poet who raids the different meta-languages and ideas of his time, yet has somehow annealed them, rather like his admired Hart Crane. It’s the sort of personal engagement not often encountered in poets of his kind of manic awareness. For a start, a sense of humour
Simon Jenner