Poetry
Portraits & Repetition
By Stephen Ratcliffe
Once I sat on a train from New York City next to a man who was reading (avidly, non-stop) a book of music. I am hit with this same sensation reading Portraits and Repetition, whose poems take the kyric impulse in a direction that favors silence. You can read them like pieces of sheet music, and though they appear to be simply painterly, they are ordered like abstract, mathematical notations. You hear what you see, and no one is there.
—Fanny Howe
This book stuns me every time I go back to it-- it's so quiet, so calm, yet it accumulates into a tremendous presence based entirely in the senses. Ratcliffe begins with Stein's wondering "what one saw when one looked at anything really looked. . ." and then proceeds to see. And as with those famous coastlines that keep getting longer, the closer he looks the more there is. He articulates it all in a syntax so attentive that it startled us back into the world.
—Cole Swensen
2002 476 pages $14.00 ISBN: 978-0-942996-46-3
