Turning Over the Earth

“Turning Over the Earth introduces an authentic poetic and ecological imagination. These meditations are eloquent and poignant, worthy of sustained reading.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”