For example, I had not considered him with respect to the rural tradition. This is a genre that I associate with Southern poets\u2014but the locales in this book are near the Great Lakes\u2014Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula, Ohio. Nonetheless, the poems in this book have a distinctly \u201cSouthern\u201d feel to them–but without the overt biblical references. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In general, the tone is wistful and nostalgic, but largely unsentimental. The lineation is often sparse, with unrhymed couplets the preferred style. Though the language is mostly plain-spun, Ramspeck is clearly enamored by the sound, the physicality, of words. At times, the phrasing can be wonderfully surprising: \u201ca clemency of clouds,\u201d \u201calluvial darkness,\u201d \u201cthe silage of stars,\u201d \u201cthe cuneiform \/ tangles of your hair.\u201d This is a poet who loves alliteration, and uses it to great effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I typically read poetry books in a desultory manner, but this one displays a thematic arc from start to finish. The poems in the first section (Conjuring) look back upon the poet\u2019s childhood, or rather, adolescence\u2014that transitional phase between childish longing and adult desire. We get a glimpse into a troubled homelife, and the parents\u2019 eventual divorce. In \u201cNotes on Beauty: The Skull,\u201d the father finds a woodchuck\u2019s skull buried in the dirt, cleans it off, and presents it to the mother \u201cfor their final \/ anniversary.\u201d Such a wonderful image, as you\u2019re not sure whether the gift was an honest gesture of love, or an assertion that their love is dead and buried. If it\u2019s the first, then the father is (tragically?) unaware of their impending separation; if it\u2019s the second, he\u2019s handing over the divorce papers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the middle section (Claiming), the poet is in his prime\u2014he experiences love and marriage, haunted initially by a miscarriage but redeemed eventually by a child. This brief section is replete with primordial ooze\u2014even in the titles, which include words like \u201cDust,\u201d \u201cMud,\u201d \u201cStones,\u201d and of course \u201cMoon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final section (Burying) reflects on the final stages of life. Here we see the parents, no longer the hale and earthy creatures of the first section, but now wispy and shrunken with age. Death, and impending death, are the overriding themes. This section contains one of my favorite poems in the book, \u201cPaper Skin.\u201d While it focuses on an elderly neighbor, its real subject is the pragmatic and dutiful father, who \u201ccommanded\u201d the poet \u201cto mow her grass in summer and shovel her driveway in winter.\u201d And while it seems that the father is driven by a sense of decency and courtesy, of noblesse oblige, he nonetheless tells the son to filch some useful tools from the lady\u2019s basement after she\u2019d died, before her relatives could come and claim them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, this is not the first we\u2019ve seen of the elderly neighbor in these poems. Like many poets with an obsessive fascination with the past, Ramspeck replays and recasts scenes throughout the book. We see the elderly neighbor more than once, along with her granddaughter, an early subject of the poet\u2019s gaze and desire. We see young lovers carrying blankets to the river\u2019s edge again and again. We encounter the boy who drowned in the river more than once. As a young man, he lived across the street from a funeral home (is there a better place for an emerging poet to live?), which becomes another recurring theme. In fact, we occasionally get some variation of \u201cformaldehyde\u201d (e.g., \u201cthe stars \/\/ grew slowly mired in their jar of formalin\u201d), which may be a direct result of his proximity to the embalmer\u2019s workshop. He\u2019ll often try different ways of executing the same idea\u2014so for instance, to describe the color of sunrise or sunset, we get \u201cthe dusk sky \/ slitting the throats of the clouds\u201d in one poem, and in another, \u201cdawn \/ would slip its necklace \/ of blood over \/\/ the horizon\u2019s neck.\u201d On the other hand, the recasting and reviewing sometimes comes across as too much reliance on phrases or images that have worked in the past. The adjective \u201clow-slung,\u201d for example, sets a tone the first time it appears, but by the third time, it just draws attention to itself. And, as mentioned, the force of the moon as objective correlative gets diluted with repeated use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, what I love about Ramspeck is his joy in language and his ability to tweak and extend a phrase into something unexpected and beautiful. For example, these lines from \u201cArs Poetica with Heron and Dance\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ramspeck also has a new book out from Cloudbank Books and another forthcoming from WordWorks. I look forward to checking them out, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Doug Ramspeck: Black Flowers Recently, I picked up a book by a poet whom I\u2019ve admired for many years\u2014Doug Ramspeck. Previously, I had only encountered his work in journals, which is to say, one or two at a time. With … Continue reading ![](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/4190LRxtVSL.jpg\")
<\/a>Nature, writ large, is a brooding and impassive force in these poems. There\u2019s plenty of mud, muck, and loam, and often it proffers the delicate skull of a small animal, bleached and moony. And the moon itself is a constant feature\u2014it\u2019s a rare poem in this collection that does not mention the moon in some manner. There are birds, too, of course. Herons, which typically assume a godly stature, and crows and grackles, which are vaguely associated with the poet\u2019s mother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
to bats, as though everything transforms in darkness
to something ancient.<\/div>\n\n\n\n