Search results for ""Author Bin Ramke""

Aerial is concerned with the sky-its cloud-laden aspects in the first section, its dry realms of severe spirituality in the second. And as poetry is always about attention to language, the words cloud and clod-a shape of vapor and a shape of dirt-are key to this book's antithetical obsessions. But so, too, are words such as father, hunger, and edge. The implied narrative behind the poems has to do with family, but especially with loss of family members and how the connections they once formed live on for good or ill. The frail human community-always touching earth and touched by sky, by winds, weather, and words as if from God or the gods-lies behind every stanza. Ramke's early work in mathematics and his many years as a literary editor result in a diction and style which moves readily among scientific, religious, and literary discourse and discoveries. His desire to bring fact into the sharpest focus (remembering the connection between fact and manufacture) results in a tumbling sort

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Sharing insight into many private forms of suffering - mental illness, loss of loved ones, family crises - this work uses personal issues to assess continued struggles with the profound questions of what it means to be human, moral and conscious.

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Poems that ask how perception turns into memory, and what is lost when this happens

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Poems that personally engage with the materiality and danger of earth. A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem “Earth Took of Earth,” this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke’s attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth—for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase “heaven on earth,” turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.

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Scientific elegies of ambition and failure from this esteemed poet

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