Tendril - Softcover

Ramke, Bin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650269 ISBN 13: 9781890650261

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2007

Synopsis

By drawing the small instances of living to the forefront of meaning, this collection of elegant and lyrical poems reveals the value of simple events in our lives. Allowing the reader to follow the personal, cultural, and artistic threads that intertwine to create our conscious understanding, these poems explore how family, culture, class, gender, historical moment, landscape, and the language we use come together to impact reality. From inch worm moths to Gregg shorthand, from fishing on the bayou to the horrors of world war, from the impact of great art and literature to the profound devastation of natural disaster, these poems show us how the tendrils of meaning running through them are made of words, which weave together to form the fabric of our lives.

About this title

About the Author:

Bin Ramke teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Phipps professor of English at the University of Denver. He is the author of more than eight poetry collections, including Airs, Waters, Places; Matter; and Wake. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. In his ninth collection of poems, Ramke—a Yale Younger Poetry Prize winner, Denver Quarterly editor and questing poetic experimenter—engages with contemporary American politics, philosophical and literary traditions, and an oblique version of autobiography. Can you tell the casualty from the cause? he wonders, in Yeats Was Asked (To Write a Poem About the War), one of several looks at America's current embattled state. Elsewhere, in these 26 rambling, often several page, free verse meditations, Ramke describes a historical insane asylum in which, When a patient could properly behave at tea, he was released; recalls the dying days of a famous mathematician; thinks about child- and fatherhood; and engages in his trademark intertextual and etymological wonderings: the word fear is related to fare and it fits. In this mature work, Ramke remains a difficult, sometimes obscure poet, related at times to Ashbery and Jorie Graham, but also a stylist very much of his own invention. And amid dizzying references, brilliant points of emotional clarity and depth shine through: we are afraid of everything, just not all the time. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1890650269
• ISBN 13: 9781890650261
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120