SOURCE: Loudon, Michael. Review of Jacklight. World Literature Today 60, no. 1 (winter 1986): 159.

In the following review, Loudon offers favorable criticism of Jacklight.

Designating someone's “first book of poems” as such is typically an apologetic strategy. For Erdrich, “first-rate,” “first ground,” and “first light” are more descriptive of the forty-four poems of Jacklight. I felt early in the reading the same narrative force, precise images, and complex characters that eventually found full expression in her celebrated novel Love Medicine (1984), but the poems are far from mere exercises on the way to a novel. They are first-rate poems: the language again and again sings to its own vision. An ordinary event in the cycle of seasons, the falling of blossoms, becomes “White crowns of the plum trees / were filling the purple throats of the iris”; or consider the reflection of parents: “We are alone here on earth / with the ragged breath...