The Daily Free Press National Book Critics Circle Awards Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003   Jackson Anoints the Streets Reviewed by Daniel DeBonis, Contributing Writer   Love, mortality, melancholy — these are the great poetic themes to which Major Jackson has added another: urban renewal. Jackson isn’t the first poet to address the subject. After all, urban poets reflect a world that is made and remade every day, but he takes his pen to the streets of the slums.   Leaving Saturn begins with “Urban Renewal,” a twelve-part meditation on art, humanity and Philadelphia. The first image is a painter, working religiously: “anointing streets I love with all my mind’s wit.” Then, after wandering through local history, lonely alleys, the Liberty Bell, Temple and various other locales and complexities, the narrator arrives at the Cascades, listening to “This American Life.” Jackson’s subjects may start out in the Blumberg Housing Projects, but they invariably end up elsewhere, recalling a place far away. After all, Leaving Saturn is inspired by Sun Ra, the jazz pianist who claimed to have been sent to Philadelphia on a mission from Saturn.   It’s a mistake to categorize Jackson’s work as social, sacrificing the varied abilities of a talented poet for the sake of easy classification. He is certainly socially conscious — but conscious of the broad prejudice (and solidarity) that comes from living on the wrong side of the tracks. His poetry bears many resemblances to Carl Sandburg’s, drawing on definite people and places, inventive free verses and a clear poetic language. Both are occasionally sentimental, but unlike Sandburg, Jackson withholds judgment, sharing his subjects’ guilt. In “Euphoria,” for instance, the young narrator pays for a handjob while his mother is in a crack den, enjoying that “happiness so hard to come by.”   Jackson’s poetry is built on the idea that art can be the instrument of urban renewal, and as a poet, Jackson himself is pointing the way