Critical Commentary
“Jeff Franklin’s poems are brilliantly achieved, and speak to us from a mind and heart that deeply know and feel the dimensions of the human condition—its capacity for empathy, joy, and inevitably, sorrow and loss. His poems help defend us against these aspects of mortality, making time our ally while we read, leaving us with a new hope alive in language.” – James Applewhite, author of Time Beginnings
“In Where We Lay Down, the poet’s attention, like light-dapples, passes from parent to spouse to warfare to porcupine, transporting readers through a vivid past into an endless present. . . .though it is mid-morning, Franklin writes in ‘Autumnal Equinox,’ the sun, / scattering its shipwreck’s coins / on the sea-bottom beneath the crabapple, // shines with that dreamy quality of light / I know mid-afternoon will match precisely: / resolution balancing expectancy. It’s a fitting coda for a powerful volume in which air merges with water, earth reveals itself as the once and future sea-floor, treasure is born of terrible wreckage, and mid-morning is already mid-afternoon. This is a book of incantation and connection, offering both treasure and a hope of equinoctial balance.” – Catherine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars
“Where We Lay Down is a significant achievement. These are multi-layered, thick, substantial poems that confront tough subjects: transformation, inheritance, deterioration, and our debt to the animal. As the Buddha said, "Decay is inherent in all compounded things," and, as these poems show, all things are compounded. Written in a startling array of forms, from blank verse to free verse, sestina to pantoum, they are full of knowledge, and they always adapt the form to the language, rather than the other way around, changing the reader’s notion of poetic form in the process.” – James Najarian, author of The Goat Songs
“Where We Lay Down is the work of a perceptive, mature, and generous soul who ponders the complications of a great many things—family, roots, relationship, history, and literature—in coming to terms with the burdens of our inheritance. Jeffrey Franklin offers serious, nuanced, and often playful meditations on these particular aspects of what it is to be human in beautiful formal verses that make delicious use of our rich English word-hoard at every turn. It is the record of an intelligent quest for authenticity, and for how one manages ‘Living Right’ at this particular moment in time.” – Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip, New and Selected Poems
