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86 pages, 2001
$16.00 paper 0-87745-776-X, 978-0-87745-776-3
“The translucent transience of life flowing has seldom been more poignantly and pertinently evoked. Bin Ramke's Airs, Waters, Places is magisterial. He is our Heraclitus.”—John Ashbery
“There is a Shelleyan grandeur here. In Airs, Waters, Places Bin Ramke writes lyric drama of very great heart, a drama whose troubling theme is nothing less than the Tragedy of Wisdom. With exacting energies, these poems test measure, test mind itself against real death. In the end, humanness shows forth nobly, consumed by fires stolen from Fire. This is permanent poetry.”—Donald Revell, author of There Are Three and Beautiful Shirt
Like the ancient medical text by Hippocrates that gives this book its title, Airs, Waters, Places looks with intensity and purpose at the elemental world to understand the possibility of an expanded notion of health in an often disconnected and disconnecting social order. In the poet's words, “To call language a nervous system might be useful: if each sentient being is analogous to cells within the organism, language is analogous to the nerves as well as the messages sent along those nerves. There is, there, if not eternity, at least delusion.” This is a book of various appetites in constant motion.
Bin Ramke has published six previous books of poems, including Massacre of the Innocents and Wake (Iowa, 1995 and 1999). The editor of the Denver Quarterly, he teaches creative writing at the University of Denver.
from “Watery”
Nietzsche admired Thales admiring clarity (water as father)
water as everything, in its way—the world. As if, |
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