Blurbs for earlier  books 

"A superb piece of work . . . . A set of poems entirely remarkable for
the physical pungency of their language, their muscular and sensitive rhythm, their power in
creating a particular work in its real time and place. Some of the poems are positively harrowing in 
their effectiveness, the truth and depth of their feeling, which, of course can only be revealed by the most 
careful, intelligent craftsmanship." - James Wright

“What is new and comparatively rare in poets is [Jellema’s] discovery that a lyrical impulse and a meditative urgency may alternate, feed off each other, disguise themselves as each other… [His poems] show a technique forged from confrontation with the demands of content to become formal. That is what good poets can do and less good poets can never arrange.” - William Matthews

"These poems run the necessary risks and win them all -- the risk of feeling without sentimentality,of gentleness without softness, and of startling without blinding or terrifying. Rod Jellema sees the strange in the ordinary and makes the commonplace wide again . . . .
​This is couth poetry,but never flat.To read it is pleasure -  Alberta Turner
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And more recent ones . . .

             Incarnality

Rod Jellema has been making poems for more than forty years. This beautiful collection is a distillation of his best work, also including a number of new poems that interact with and enhance the earlier poems chosen here.
In an age of glare, Jellema's poems celebrate the need for the mystery of darkness. At a time when earth-denying spiritualism is popular, these poems make a joyful carnival of the physical world, precisely because soul and 
spirit "matter," forming little incarnations in the configuration of the Incarnation. As a distraction from our love of bigness, they call attention to splinters and flashes, small fragments of the Eden we've lost that wants rebuilding.

One critic has described Jellema's earlier work as "bursting with raw poetic talent." 
The new poems are further evidence of that talent, expressing themselves not as a conclusion but as an extension of range that ripens Jellema's work into brilliant fullness.

Blurbs

"Rod Jellema's life project has been to play edges against one another: light against darkness, joy 
against tragedy, life against death, spirit against body, language against silence. This collection 
brilliantly reveals a master at work. It is a book of astonishing beauty." - Jeanne Murray Walker,
New Tracks, Night Falling
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“This moving body of work tells us what is holy in Rod Jellema’s world — not spirit alone, nor flesh 
alone, but their melding; not wind alone, but blown hair and leaves and swimsuits tossed on the vine 
to dry. In this world, a word is a thing — a thing breathed through, infused with breath and life. Just so, these poems make of words a life, and they invite us to celebrate and remember what abounds and abides, what matters, what sings.” - Margaret Gibson, One Body: Poems

"Like his summer neighbor, the dulcimer maker who 'whistles to the wood he works / until the wood is fit for its strings,' Rod Jellema whistles quietly and steadily over the material of his art, and for five decades has made his lines and stanzas fit a vision of experience that records a deep, spiritual 
humanism located in community, people, and the natural world." - Michael Collier, The Ledge: Poems

"Rod Jellema's Incarnality, embodying a life well-lived in art, collects the art formed of that life: poems for which all readers should be thankful; poems that reveal a mind that is open, mindful, and generous; poems whose voices move from the meditative to the humorous to the self-deprecating. . . . Incarnality is art of the highest order." - Greg McBride, The Innisfree Poetry Journal
 
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           A Slender Grace

Published by Eerdmans in 2005, winner for that year of the Towson University Prize for Literature 
and the Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature

Blurbs and Reviews

“Reading these chastely-chiseled compositions provides a pleasure of a high order — health to the mind and challenges to live reflectively. They prove the truth of [Czeslaw] Milosz’s observation that ‘One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.’” - Christianity & Literature

"Rod Jellema writes about the real world of freight trains, Eden, dogs, death, jukeboxes, summer houses, Nicaragua, and ice picks. He also writes about the fissures he finds in this real world — the lonely cracks between light and dark, sound and silence, now and then, us and ourselves. He pries at the cracks like a man opening an oyster. Inside the oyster are transcendence and redemption. How beautiful. How real." - Henry Allen

"While more and more of us doubt our faith could pass scrutiny by the full light of day, these poems find good news in the dark. Whether he sets us down in front of blind Willie Johnson playing the blues or asks us to spend a night on the bare floor of a church in Nicaragua, Rod Jellema teaches us to see what he sees — slender revelations flung toward us by the veiled but gracious God who means to lead us home." - Barbara Brown Taylor

"Today, with our human species on the brink of various political-ecological catastrophes, we look for poetry that faces the worst and earns its own being. Rod Jellema’s Slender Grace spares us nothing of our searing knowledge of Treblinka, or of the ravaged villagers of Nicaragua, or of the persecution of artistic spirit, or of our mania in the Middle East. His intuitive need in this “age of glare” for redemptive mystery and darkness, 
as this need generates his poems, is profound and moving. This is a strong, welcome, consoling book." - William Heyen

"Rod Jellema, like most mystics, starts small and ends large. He looks into a dryer in a Laundromat and suddenly he is at the river, pounding on his clothes with a rock — past and present merged. He looks at a green bean and sees “the holy scent of turned earth / slendered into a bean.” But he is a mystic who never becomes mystical; he never loses touch with the earth. He is a poet of deep and humane good sense who’s infused with an abiding awareness of the holy. There is much more than a slender grace in A Slender Grace." - Andrew Hudgins

“'The slender grace of a sudden thought / that takes you past your self. . . .' Rod Jellema could be describing moments in so many of these thoughtful, beautifully realized poems, whether they are describing green beans or van Gogh or an Eden after the fall. This is perhaps his strongest collection." - Linda Pastan

"Rod Jellema regards a various world with love and patience, and records with energetic precision his 
encounters with it. His sense of a brief instant’s emotional weight is unerring." - Henry Taylor

"I have been reading Rod Jellema’s beautifully crafted poetry for the better part of three decades, each time having my sense of wonder refreshed. With A Slender Grace Rod captures whole and clean Joseph Conrad’s description of the writer’s task: “He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” What a stunning, perfectly controlled work this is, with that same depth of wisdom, insight, and mystery that readers have learned to associate with Rod. The illuminating introduction, moreover, in itself makes the volume worthwhile." - John H. Timmerman

"In A Slender Grace Rod Jellema sounds like the spiritual heir of Henry Vaughan. His verse essays, epistles, meditations, and disquisitions upon things and emotions wrestle with what really matters — how to live, finding and valuing love, loss, and music. His poems are latter-day dialogues of self-and-soul." - Laurance Wieder

"A Slender Grace is emotional, captivating, deftly penned, and speaks directly to the heart in a body of inspiring work urging the reader to never surrender to despair." - Midwest Book Review

“Jellema’s focus may well be on the minute, yet the scope of the poet’s vision is, by no means, small…. 
These are wise poems that seek to teach us to be patient, to dwell in mystery, ‘to be unafraid in the dark.’” - Christianity and Literature