Seth Jani
Poet. Publisher. Interdimensional Vagrant.
Field music
Full-Length Collection
FutureCycle Press, 2023
"Seth Jani’s Field Music is a quiet body of poems. Deeply meditative and rooted in a love of the natural world, reading Field Music feels to me like a walk, like wandering through a familiar wood with a thoughtful friend as your guide. In Jani’s poems the human and natural world are revealed to be intimately layered together, as 'we are pinned to a mystery, / mitochondrial, and big as an / extinct language.' Reading this collection, we are taught 'a hard, industrious joy' by 'even the rocks.' We watch in awe as 'the sunflowers crack open / their rattled heads of light.'
The speaker in these poems holds their images softly, turning them in the hand like a jewel, refracting further and further light."
-Millie Tullis,
Psaltery & Lyre
Night Fable
Full-Length Collection
FutureCycle Press, 2018
"Seth Jani’s Night Fable is a verdant dreamscape, an exquisite journey through '"the strange dark of almost waking.'" Guided by birdsong, the rhythms of water, and the phases of the moon, here are beginnings and border spaces. Jani’s work invites readers to pass through doorways: to darkness and light, to the broken and the whole, to the strange and the familiar which 'straddle the forgetful banks of sleep and small thinking.'"
-Hayley Mitchell Haugen,
Sheila-Na-Gig online
The Wet season
Chapbook
Kelsay Books, 2018
"In The Wet Season, Jani finds solace in the damp of autumn, drawing comfort from its primary colours in thirty vivid poems of delicate melancholy. An accomplished collection which prizes the redemptive, healing power of the natural world above all else."
-Ben Banyard, Clear Poetry
In the house magisterial
Chapbook
Finishing Line Press, 2018
"Jani possesses the unusual ability to see the forest from eight different angles, to notice the glow of unlit lanterns. And yet his work is full of hidden fire and strange blossoming creatures, images of ghosts and angels and even demons. He hears music in the wind, feels the light of desire on his skin, becomes transfigured by incantations while walking nearly deserted streets, delighting in the small flights of swallows, intimate among themselves. This world seems a shimmering uncatchable scene, and yet he draws more than its outlines and shadows, catches something of its essence, with skillful structure and resonant syntax."
- W.F. Lantry, Peacock Journal
Questions from the interior
Full-Length Collection
Seven CirclePress, 2014
"Seth Jani invites us to listen for the ambient voices and crickets cavorting in our lawns, to understand that we would become beautifully unknown one day, to look starwards and open our doors to the elements - the wheat around you - and soak them up. Questions from the Interior is a commendable collection that itself needs to be soaked up, each line pleading with you to become aware that you are just a shack of 'bones in a tapestry of light, gases and stars.'"
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-Ajay Vishwanathan, Foundling Review
Let us rejoice:
poems 2003-2009
Full-Length Collection
Seven CirclePress, 2009
"Seth Jani does not profess to understand all the mysteries of God in these poems. Instead, his poems are studies of self and surroundings, landscapes with a traveler who happens to be a poet. These poems are sometimes Whitmanesque in their sense of a common humanity. The descriptions of the desert world have the sensitivity of Gary Snyder. The spiritual depth of the poems reminded me of Thomas Merton."
-Christopher Woods, Terrain.org (reviewing the section Desert Psalms)