Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he...
Turning Over the Earth
With nods to Johannes Brahms and Joseph Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, Ralph Black’s poems in Turning Over the Earth tell of a passion for being in the world, a desire to make meaningful contact with the sensuous, both natural and human. With beautifully accessible imagery, Black explores the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street—amazed.
ISBN:
978-1-57131-411-6 Publish Date:
12/12/2000
Pages:
104
Size:
5.5 × 8.44 × 0.31 in
Weight:
5 oz
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Praise and Prizes
“Turning Over the Earth introduces an authentic poetic and ecological imagination. These meditations are eloquent and poignant, worthy of sustained reading.”
Harold Bloom
“Stark and delicious . . . This collection contains one of the most exuberant flights of the ecological imagination I have experienced.”
Earthlight
“At the same time accounting to the particulars of our place, the poems in this book represent the movement of transfigurations into a made shape, the real place, the new place.”
A. R. Ammons
“There is love here, and loss, despair and—my favorite mode of Ralph Black’s—exultation. This is evident in the majestic final poem, ‘Last Will.’ I’d cross great distances to find a poem as lovely as this one, and to possess a book as fine and fresh as Turning Over the Earth.”
Jay Parini
“A celebration of existence as a living creature on a vivid, breathing planet.”
Orion
“Poems that memorably capture the textures and rhythms, the meandering thoughts and shifting emotional temperature, of typical days in an ordinary life and that rise (at their best) to surprising, moving and entirely credible small epiphanies.”
Hudson Review
“In loving touch with process, full of the intimacy and clarity of home truths rightly earned—Ralph Black’s language enacts the adventure of a consciousness making a home for itself, making itself at home, in the world.”
Eamon Grennan
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