Prayer Wind is Jack Hayes' most ambitious work to date. Written through four difficult years, the poems reflect not only Jack's personal journey but the hugely challenging times in which we all found ourselves. His words also reflect the cycle of the year and the pulse of nature with their inevitable highs and lows. Playful, deeply reflective, sad and joyful - Prayer Wind is all these and more.
These are poems not to be hurried but to be read at leisure, to be savoured. They are an infinite box of delights that can give the reader a fresh perspective, a different insight, a more nuanced view of the world, at every visit.
Jack Hayes' output has been substantial for many years - always high quality, but known to few. Prayer Wind should establish him with a wider audience, and may yet mark him out as the American poet of the decade.
Review :
John Hayes generous three volume Prayer Wind promises much. "Bodhi Day Through Overcast", for instance, opens with "morning star at perigee/ red light let it shine" and moves us through the scrub jay perched on the top boughs of the tree of life, "someday that will be [him] at the edge of forever", until we end up with ourselves on an ordinary day, considering his assurance that "there is no end of becoming this this morning", and finding that somehow, the poem might be right, and somehow it might help.
But how did he do it? How does he continue to do it through the three hundred and eighty-eight poems covering the messy, difficult state of the world from late 2019 to late 22?
It was simple. Through the crazy richness of the language and the mind behind it, the slant rhymes and the eye rhymes, the assonance, the consonance, the vivid imagery, the telling detail, the play with the alphabet of forms from blank verse and couplets to sestinas and sonnets to villanelles, and to a considerable extent through the pure music of his lines. Besides all that, there is the near absence of punctuation. With such minimal guidance, resolution hangs suspended. The structure provided by form can only do so much and the space opened by the absence of dots and diddle marks frees the readers perception. Allusions open out and add richness even without knowledge of their context, symbols shapeshift, intention slides from one phrase or line into another, inside a space of reassuring clarity. Where thought moves like Yeats' long-legged spider, the words themselves, perfectly apt, precise in both their openness and their closure, bring the focus sharply back to the world and its ten thousand ordinary and extraordinary things.
In Hayes work, whether he's dealing with his oxygen concentrator, civil strife, or the sparrow in the rhododendron outside his window, there is always the promise, the working through, and the conclusion that although nothing can be resolved, there is always becoming. Which is enough. As he tells us in "Atonement", "beautiful afternoon asks what would life be not learning lessons again yet again."
Sheila Graham-Smith
