Always Near the Edge

The selection of poetic works in this volume range from his pondering the joys of intimacy with lines sprinkled across the page, to a compact three-hundred word single-sentence rant that captures his agonizing abandonment to "the drug." Readers will find a delightful whimsical page on "the One Man Committee on Ways and Means." Although several of these works plunge deeply into the pain and frustration Jansma experienced, he expresses those feelings often through imagined characters careening through the painful blunders of life. One extended poem celebrating a marriage reminds one of Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost. His deeply spiritual prayer before surgery takes us beyond the bounds of human limits into a trajectory toward the hard consolation of profound faith. The poetic works are arranged under the section titles: Sensuality, Desolation, Lyrical, Philosophical, and Hard Consolation.