Blur

A kind of tension pervades these poems, balanced by an under-the-surface, learned tenderness. In Blur, place is one of the memorable characters. The poems actively slip into the mystery and rhythm of boy-ness, giving us the children's roughhousing as much as the snow and riverbank. Time moves on to longing and dreams. "Decades became a bolt / on a door-sometimes latched, sometimes open." Ramspeck is sonically skilled at opening a reader to "the austerity and the gentleness of holding still."

Blur is lean, and confident, and devastating. Even as he reflects on a childhood shadowed by the threat of family violence, the poet repeatedly takes our breath away with such visions as "the lone hearse of a cloud / amid an interrogation of light." And, while "Primitive Prayers" reminds us that "Nothing is more present / than memory," nearly every poem's remembering is layered with haunting images from nature-"the funerary snow" or "something hardening into flung stone"-which lend a different key and depth than mere details could ever supply. How not to eagerly read on? How not "to study the way fireflies / keep changing their minds / about existence"?

The reader comes of age a hundred times in Ramspeck's poignant new book. Mythic and elegiac, he intertwines images from the natural world with familial and fraternal memories, with a haunting lyricism that hallows both past and present. "What we can't see is everywhere," he reminds us: always precise, always moving, these poems are "epistles of moonlight" from one of America's most gifted and prolific poets.

Blur insists upon a startling intimacy between humans and nature, upon the permeability of any barrier we think distinguishes us from the earth. Hours pierce the skin; snow kisses it; prayers are owl sounds in the woods. This book tells the story of perception, mutable and urgent, of folks hoping to find in the fields, the mud, the coyote's call a language they can interpret and wield against confusion and grief. Or perhaps they merely try to locate in the violent, implacable, beautiful world that surrounds them a set of myths they can live by. Reading these poems, I'm enlisted in the search and never sorry.