FROM THE REVIEWS

One never wants to stop reading the kind of poetry Jack Veasey writes. There is, in joyous abundance, a diner where the likes of Whitman, Sandburg and Steinbeck could enjoy a cup of tea. The spotlight of Veasey's work is humanity without varnish, without capped teeth and colored contact lenses. This is the apotheosis of the poetry of involvement.

-- Bob Tramonte, Home Planet News, New York City

The presumption in these poems that people have strengths that can carry them through hard times blends respect and admiration into an empathy for lives. The poem develops an awareness of humanity incarnate in the individual... Although I'm quite certain he is able to identify the tyrants around us, Veasey is not interested in casting out devils as much as he is in applauding the saints, those qualities of being human that are never so much lost as they are temporarily forgotten.

-- Frank Correnti, The Pittsburgh Quarterly

Whether his subject is a man living out of a bus station locker or a wide-eyed kid at a neighborhood fire, Veasey puts together blunt, cutting narratives that make you wonder how we can possibly accept things as they are.

-- Mike Gunderloy, FactSheet Five. Rensselaer, NY

His strongest poems are spare, sympathetic portraits that reveal whole histories of loneliness in small details. These are deceptively simple, surprisingly resonant poems.

-- David A. Warner, The Philadelphia City Paper

Many of his poems present an often troubling world where, for instance, people are relieved that a screaming siren near Three Mile Island signals the burning of a neighbor's house and not a nuclear meltdown, and where, too, the struggle to remain aware is a difficult one for those ground down by work...It is in his unresolved attraction to the outsider, his sense of being the only one, the other one, that Veasey shows the sensibility of all minorities.

-- David Eberly, Bay Windows, Boston, MASS

The pen of a skilled poet can spin a solitary filament of words that snags readers and then expands to connect them with the writer and one another in a web of universal human emotions and experiences. Jack Veasey is that kind of poet...In plain talk that is simultaneously lyrical and lucid, Veasey writes of playgrounds and childhood, of the deaths of parents, of love and disappintment, of the price of forgiveness...simple but immensely effective.

-- Mary O. Bradley, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, Harrisburg, PA

The author is Irish and a lapsed Catholic. His background is blue-collar Philadelphia. His politics are anti-bureaucratic. But Jack Veasey's poems pack the appeal -- and sting -- of universality...Veasey speaks with the clarity and directness of an Everyman...a passionate poet of the people.

-- Jim Ruth, Sunday News, Lancaster, PA

...glimpses of life that are humorous, poignant, sometimes harsh and painful, yet with a spiritual tone. There is a compassion in his writing, urging the reader to take another, gentler look at others.

-- Susan Oscilowski, The Daily News, Lebanon, PA

This is the poetry of someone who's "been there." His beautiful, spare descriptions are compelling. His words allow light to fall and change the darkness into something much less frightening.

-- Mary Durham, Oxalis, Kingston, NY

Veasey's poems are engagingly forthright narratives that leave you wondering how the poet could have said so much with such apparent ease. He imbues his work with macabre humor and unexpected tenderness. His poems are like genuinely good melodies -- lucid, deceptively simple, hard to forget -- but more arresting and potent than that analogy might suggest.

-- David McKenna, The Welcomat, Philadelphia, PA

Truth can make us squirm uncomfortably...especially when seen through the eyes of the unspoiled child. Jack Veasey is the persistent, nagging youth who won't let us hide from our lives. He is the observer of glaring injustices, of inhumanities, of a Hollywood-molded make-believe world...His pointed logic spares no one.

-- H. John Johnson, Asphodel. Pitman, NJ