In Primary Light

“John Wood's poems are at once elegant and easily approachable. He writes by making simple appeals through the senses, though I find it interesting to study the spiritual man in the sheep's clothing of a forthright, almost commonsensical observer. The poet asks us to extrapolate meaning, rather than to be instructed; he takes it as an act of faith that spirituality resonates in the temporal world and that the sublime may be best implied in the mundane. His voice is strong, original, and pervasive.”—Ann Beattie

“The total effect of In Primary Light is not dark, and this is not merely because of the increasingly celebratory flavor of the latter poems; it is also because Wood strikes a chord somewhat like Samuel Beckett's: however negative Wood's statements are, they are made with gusto and felicity, in exuberant long sentences full of energy, invention, and baroque high jinks. At the crossroads of this attitude and his style is where we find Wood's signature.”—Richard Wilbur

“As befits its complex themes—earthly desire and the vagaries of faith—John Wood's first collection reveals like a prism the gloom-to-irony-to-revelry range of life, an equally complex array of emotional colors normally left blended and blinding…There is no doubt here …that this work is 'the real thing.'”—New Delta Review

“John Wood is a poet of often harrowing candor, and at the same time a strange but unmistakably authentic sweetness prevades whatever he writes. For absolute integrity of feeling and expression, there is nobody like him.”—Amy Clampitt