Details

Series

Iowa poetry prize. [More in this series]

Summary note

• Throughout Bin Ramke's book of poems, certain elements recur insistently: birds and boyhood, betrayal and longings that careen between flesh and faith. Ramke refuses to distinguish between scientific and poetic approaches to knowing the world. In Wake, the poet does not pretend to offer wisdom but instead offers words, and the words are given as much freedom as possible.
• The title itself resonates with all its presumptive meanings: an alternative to dreaming, a ceremony binding the living to the dead, and the pattern left briefly in water by boats - handwriting as turbulence in a fluid medium.
• Elements of the world at large are woven into the language of these poems, resulting in a conversation among transcripts from the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, passages from the notebooks of John James Audubon a meditation on the Book of Daniel, whole epic sentences out of Milton, and the modest observations of the struggling poet himself.

Contents

• The Ruined World
• Essay
• A Theory of Fantasy
• Chivalric
• A Little Ovid Late in the Day
• Livery of Seisin
• Shostakovich and Kubatsky in Archangel
• Mercy
• Someone whispers Below in the Garden
• Sad Stories
• Grass Fires
• Small Noise the Weather Makes
• Body Parts (1968)
• & the War in France
• Another Lean, Unwashed Artificer
• A History of His Heart
• Pretty Words, Parabolas
• Enter Celia, with a Writing
• A Great Noise the World Makes
• A History of Tenderness
• For I Have Already Been Once ...
• And the Light Never Waned in the Same Way Twice
• How Light Is Spent
• Toying
• Toy Houses in the Landscape
• Crisis
• Famous Poems of the Past Explained
• Testimony.

Show 25 more Contents items

ISBN

0877456585 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

98047406

OCLC

40074170

RCP

C - O

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