Words on the table - A new book review

 

                                 Words on the table, Jim Potts

A gratifying new review of my book, provided by Edmund Marsden in California. 

Thank you Edmund!

"You will enjoy this rich and stimulating collection of poems and in doing so get to appreciate and admire its author–his curiosity and commitments, his talent for friendship, and his gift for succinct and telling expression.  

Jim Potts has led a varied and much-travelled life. His generous sympathies encompass family and numerous friends, places, politics, literature and art, and music–especially jazz. He makes them all the subjects of his work. His gift lies in accurately capturing his states of mind as he responds with a clear eye to the kaleidoscope of encounters that have made up his life.  

He uses poems like diary entries to track his experiences of a wide range of countries, mostly in Europe and Africa, and to record his efforts to embrace their cultures. He was privileged through his work as a cultural diplomat to meet and befriend many scholars, artists and poets. His work chronicles the twists and turns in his emotional life, his political convictions and his encounters with an astonishingly rich variety of people and places, not least his joy and relief in returning to the freedom and security of home. 

Jim Potts always strives for clarity and directness of expression in his own in poetry and prose as well as in his many sympathetic translations from poets he has known and admired. 

The moving section he has called ‘Facing off the thought police’ contains poems which record Jim Potts’ responses to living and travelling in authoritarian regimes or those where freedoms were curtailed but writers and artists nevertheless found means to express themselves. The years that perhaps marked him more than any others were those spent working in the former Czechoslovakia between 1986 and 1989. Later he was able to examine the 1,400 banal pages of his Czechoslovak Secret Service file compiled in ironic counterpoint to his own poetic record. 

Above all, Jim Potts cares about his readers. He works hard to keep them close through his informative and enjoyable notes which provide background to his travels, explain references he thinks might be unfamiliar, and introduce you to the array of fascinating individuals he writes about".

Some of these review comments were used in this article by Karen Bate in West Dorset Magazine, February 25, 2022: