Matter

By Bin Ramke

Kuhl House Poets

102 pages, 6 1/8 x 8 inches, 2004
$16.00 paper, 0-87745-900-2, 978-0-87745-900-2

“These meditations on matter become questions about auras, and though they begin in the body of childhood and stay with issues of flesh and figure, they are posited in a somber optimism, the kind that sees—just out of reach—something better.”—Fanny Howe, author of The Wedding Dress

Bin Ramke’s poetry has always been concerned with separating the real from the wished-for or the feared. In Matter, Ramke investigates not only the physical realities of our world but the qualities that make things important to us, that give them weight. These poems, often in the voice of a child, are full of yearning and anguish but also an appreciation for the enhanced perceptions and small pleasures to be found among the sadness. “All lost things have the same voice,” he says, and this universal voice reminds us of home and family and the simple connections of ordinary life—the things that matter.

“When I was a saint,” begins the first poem, “I did not have visions but I could see and did note the color of the world.” Matter is an examination of and a report on the world’s variable colors and possibilities for, if not sanctity, then a certain sanity, a kindness, and some form of salvation.

Bin Ramke has published seven previous books of poems, including Massacre of the Innocents (Iowa, 1995), Wake (Iowa, 1999), and one of the first Kuhl House Poets books, Airs, Waters, Places (Iowa, 2001). The editor of the Denver Quarterly, he teaches creative writing at the University of Denver and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

From “This World’s Exuberant Surface”

Next came
a color of the air, next the rain
and the day moved on—day
being a convention of design,
day being the accident of sunlight
grinding against a turning world.
This one.