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Daily Notes on Poetry
22 June 2004. I just found out that a brief review of mine is in the latest issue of Small Press Review, so I'm making my blog-chore for today easy by repriniting it here. It's a good sample my reviewing technique (as opposed to my literary criticism technique, and proof that I don't automatically knock knownstream work, as I'm often accused of doing at New-Poetry.
Finding a Home
House and Home
Rochelle Ratner
88 pp; 2003; Pa
Marsh Hawk Press, Box 220, Stuyvesant Station,
New York NY 10009
www.MarshHawkPress.org
Finding the telling detail of quotidian experiences and pinning them into permanence
with the least number of just-right words is Rochelle Ratner's forte as a poet. Her
thirteenth book of poetry, House and Home, conclusively demonstrates this. It is mainly
about her finally getting a home in the country after being a city woman most (all?) of her
life, but a significant section is devoted to a successful romance which comes across like
another kind of finding a home in the country.
Here's a sample, two excerpts from "Lilacs, Asparagus, A Broken Pear Tree":
Between thunderstorms
a car pulls into the driveway
turns around, then parks,
a little old blonde woman
asks if I remember her
no
she takes a step back
so I can look at her
"I sold you this house"
oh
what she misses most
are the lilacs
in fuller bloom this year
than she's ever seen them,
the lilacs all my friends
are wild about I take
for granted
* * *
and how do I like
her asparagus?
I've never seen it
out by the lilacs
she shows me knee-high stalks
I thought were weeds
and there's more further back,
these were the wild ones
step by step
she tries to walk the rows
she remembers planting
but can barely find them,
shows me last year's stalks
gone to seed,
other plants just starting
after she left it rained
for three days running.
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Who among us over twenty-two has not been the old lady returned to her old house? And
which of us has never shown the equivalent of such a woman around her past? It seems
to me that just about all poems in this collection are as affecting as this one. Which is
why the not-widely-known Ratner has long been in my collection of under-appreciated
contemporary American poets, now numbering over a hundred. (She's a first-rate
photographer and novelist, too.)
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