Aesopean

Aesopean Synopsis

With eight woodcuts by Alan Dixon. W.D. Jackson's Aesopean consists of two self-contained sections of Opus 1 - the (as yet unfinished) first part of his work-in-progress, Then and Now. The third part, Opus 3, was published first and was one of Frederic Raphael's 2019 TLS Books of the Year. Raphael saluted Shoestring for taking on a book of this sort which (at 494 pp.) "no sales-conscious mainstream publisher would dare to". The book was reviewed in Poetry Nation Review 253 by Chris McCully, who wrote: "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…"