This first comprehensive selection from seven decades of Dawson Jackson's poetry--long poems, lyrics, meditations, satires, elegies--reveals an original talent who followed his own strict rules in order to tell difficult truths. There is something of the mystic about Jackson: he loved the world of nature and the human form. In his writings, the very physicality of the world provides the necessary evidence of transcendence. Celebrating this world in verse, he devised a style uniquely his own.