Michigan poet Jack Ridl's new book "Saint Peter and the Goldfinch" features keen observations of simple human transactions, such as in "The Week After" where a divorced father meets again his two young sons, and though they are "eight and seven...He will read to them tonight/ for the first time."
~Glen Young, Petoskey News
These poems typically begin with a series of quiet, levelheaded observations and end in a wild imaginative leap. Jack Ridl has found a pattern that delights and surprises us poem by poem.
~Billy Collins
Jack Ridl's poems are decelerating thought-provoking impulses, often melancholically humorous meditations on what we like to overlook and on what makes us human. His poems reveal what Wallace Stevens, to whom Ridl also pays a little homage, once said: 'that imagination can surpass the wisdom of philosophers.'
~Norbert Kraas
"Jack's poetry is very high quality," [Ellen] Lightle [of the Ludington Writers] said.
~Riley Kelley, Ludington Daily News
A delight, filled with the evocative style for which Ridl is known. [. . .] Perhaps the best work yet by Ridl, readers will find the works engaging, enlightening, and insightful.
~Julie Bonner Williams, Michigan Blue Magazine
At first glance, the poem ["Saint Peter and the Goldfinch"] is a wonderful blend of imagery; upon reflection, it begins to change colors and reveal deeper meanings.
~Julie Bonner Williams, Grand Rapids Magazine
Open this book to page 27 and read ‘Ice Storm.’ Feel how it settles in your chest, how your breath resounds with a long, deep, ‘Yes,’ how subtly you are changed by what you didn’t know you knew. I’ve been reading Jack Ridl’s poems with admiration and wonder for almost forty years now and this new work goes ever deeper into the intensified heart of our everyday lives.
~Dan Gerber
A remarkable piece of loving words and observations of daily living in nature and our surrounding homes.
~Peter Wehle
The amazing poetry of Jack Ridl is written 'in the dust along the windowsill, / the star's lost light falling across / the vase of flowers on the kitchen table.' They are windows opening to mortality; they strike with the grace of starlight, and the warmth of flowers beside a meal. Ridl never fails to illuminate.
~Terrance Hayes, poet and professor
For a long time now, Jack Ridl has understood The Word, The Logos, as a meeting place of the body and the mind, the past and the emerging present, time and eternity, the concrete and the abstract, the inner and the outer worlds, the human will and the unknown, and he has practiced said Word as a way to clarify his heart, rectify his spirit, and demystify the workings of the human eye in order to realize human consciousness as a blessing, rather than a blight characterized by confusion and error. In his latest book, we witness his practice deepening, and not far below the warm and neighborly tone of these poems is the sound of a man more and more alone with The Alone. By salvaging what he can of the real and immediate world around him, he preserves for us the idea of The Human as precious and worth saving.
~Li-Young Lee, author of The Undressing
And that quiet space – where "the trees will be our amen" – is almost enough for those of us "who are still pilgrims" and who might find the need for poems like these Jack Ridl has written in the daily lives we struggle through.
~Keith Taylor, Michigan Public Radio's Stateside
I'm fond of the fact that, beyond the title, Paul Klee does not appear in Jack Ridl's luminous poem at all. I think Klee might have liked that, too. A painter who loved mystical colors blurring, earth to sky, might have liked a vividly descriptive poem which holds a long-ago moment as a hinge for everything to come. "It was just that we knew," is one of those wondrous, instinctive lines containing everything. How rare is an evening like this? How possible? That couple in their 60s might have seemed old then, but they were so alive, so aware. I am crazy about those napkins.
~Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine
