Adagio for Su Tung-p'o
Poems on How Consciousness Uses Flesh to Float Through Space/Time
Available now from Fernwood Press
The ancient Chinese poets loved ambiguity, loved paradox, and would have loved the puzzling, reality-defying entanglements that frustrate and fascinate us today. They would have laughed at them, too, while exchanging good wine and poems with each other as they watched the moon rise and be reflected in the hundred rivers flowing through the thousand mountains surrounding them and all the ten thousand things. Rob Jacques hears these poets, invoking their lines in an adagio – pursuing the metaphysical conjoining of life and love with eternity. Read and perceive how thin the veneer of science and technology is, how easily it is rubbed away, and how profound the mystery is that flows just beneath it.

Rob Jacques shares my love of interior dance that expresses itself in words—too shy for the dance floor, but not for the page.
- Bill Porter
Rob Jacques hears thousand-year-old voices of Chinese poets and responds with new songs and harmonies.
- Deng Ming-Dao
For all its quiet moments of observation and contemplation, this book is a big bang.
- Bryan Borland
Adagio for Su Tung-p’o is like one long centering prayer spoken for the soul of the world.
- James Crews
Rob Jacques’s poems take us on a monk’s journey toward discovery, holding up to the light the ways in which the material world fails us.
- Jacques J. Rancourt
Rob Jacques
Raised in northern New England, graduating from both Salem State University and the University of New Hampshire, Rob Jacques served as an officer in the U. S. Navy during the Vietnam Era, and he has taught literature courses at Northern Virginia Community College, Olympic College, and the United States Naval Academy. His poetry appears in regional and national journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, American Literary Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, and Assaracus. War Poet, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017, is a collection of his poems related to his experiences while on active duty in the U. S. Navy. Having completed a civilian career as a technical editor/writer for the U. S. Navy and the U. S. Department of Energy, Jacques lives on a rural island in Washington State's Puget Sound. Strongly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Merrill, his poems explore metaphysical aspects of life and love as well as paradoxes that arise as flesh and consciousness move together through space and time.