JAD: A Poem, by James Richard Hansen, is a slim, intensely devotional book-length poem arranged around seven relational roles: Father, Mother, Brother, Child, Teacher, Lover, and Friend. The collection reads like one long act of gratitude toward a beloved figure, moving through scenes of protection, memory, spiritual rescue, childhood wonder, romantic recognition, and friendship. Its emotional center is love as shelter: the father tucking a child beneath a “canopy of lavender lace,” the mother pulling her from the path of a reckless car, the friend guiding the speaker out of self-made shadows, and the recurring rose imagery that turns vulnerability into something luminous and defended.

Hansen’s best moments have a clear, almost prayerlike stillness, especially when he writes about the daughter as “living poetry” or imagines connection as “liquid light.” Those images could feel sentimental in another context, but here they feel sincere because the speaker returns to them with such emotional consistency. The book isn’t interested in irony or restraint. It’s open-hearted, sometimes almost startlingly so, and I respected that. There’s a rare earnestness in the way it treats love as a sacred obligation rather than a mood.

At times, the spiritual language leans on familiar phrases about God, light, dreams, and the Self. Still, the repetition begins to create its own atmosphere. The poems keep circling the same questions: How do we protect someone without possessing them? How do we survive pain without letting it harden us? How does love become both refuge and instruction? I was especially drawn to the later “Friend” section, where the walk through the forest deepens into a confrontation with fatigue, escape, and renewal. The speaker’s movement toward the farewell-to-spring flower feels quiet and earned.

I felt that JAD is less a conventional poetry collection than a sustained private offering, intimate, reverent, and emotionally unguarded. Its strength lies in its faith in tenderness, in the belief that human bonds can become a kind of spiritual architecture strong enough to shelter a damaged life. I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate devotional poetry, reflective love poems, and work that values sincerity over polish, especially those drawn to writing about family, healing, faith, and the redemptive force of deep companionship.

Pages: 64 | ISBN : 978-1418493332