STEPHEN RATCLIFFE : ROCKS & MORE ROCKS

These meditations explore, with measured attention and endless affection, how the mind walks the body farther than it could ever walk itself, and makes it, in fact, walk out of itself and into a beyond populated by Shakespeare, Oppen, Catullus, Pound, and so many others, all counting each syllable as a step in a journey whose goal is itself.  —Cole Swensen   In Rocks, as always, Steve Ratcliffe soothes, excites, mesmerizes. These long poems about heroic mountains and lakes at high altitude are also about being alive in language and thought, about the intense performance (as in Hamlet—the play keeps intruding on the poem) of presence in the world, and about syllables, as counted, step by step, stanza by stanza, line by line, with commas systematically placed, forward, enjambed—in one continuous flow—until an ending appears. These poems are music of the impersonally personal, a life lived only now, beyond conceived identity. Ratcliffe’s ongoing commitment to the practice of poetry and t