SOURCE: Shetley, Vernon. Review of Jacklight. Poetry 146, no. 1 (April 1985): 40-1.

In the following review, Shetley offers a brief criticism of Jacklight.

Louise Erdrich's rough-hewn poems view the American West they inhabit under two contrary aspects: as wild, daemonic nature or as landscape of human loneliness, whose physical correlatives are on the one hand forest and plain, and on the other roadside and small town. In the former mode, she seeks what was once called the “deep image,” a logically inexplicable but archetypally resonant cluster of language meant to liberate an elementally powerful emotional response. While her reading has probably included W. S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell, she may have gone back beyond those practitioners of the style to some of its sources; the quest for the deep image was significantly informed by the poetry of oral cultures, and Erdrich (as the book jacket informs the reader) “belongs to...