One Hidden Stuff (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Ras, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143037854 ISBN 13: 9780143037859

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006

Synopsis

Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras's poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what's cherished to what's lost, from culture to nature.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Ras’s first book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, won the Walt Whitman Award in 1997 and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is currently the director of the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.

Reviews

Beginning with a full moon and ending with "the petals/ of where we belong," this second collection takes on the clichés and mysteries of daily life—moving, loss, dogs, happiness—in hopes of finding what underlies them. Ras, whose debut, Bite Every Sorrow (1998), won the Whitman and Kate Tufts Discovery Awards, is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, approaching them mostly in a ragged, long-lined free verse that gathers steam as it moves down the page. Many of the small pleasures of these poems speed by like scenery in a train window. A speaker finds a seashell "the size of a large speck" and wonders about its ocean sound "and what kind of ear it would take to hear it." But the "small beauties" have little chance against larger historical forces, like a U.S. military campaign called "Operation Menu"; two cloud-gazing friends come across "the kind of billowings that could only be called atomic." Politics and the pain of familial relationships are often fused, as when a mother's thoughts about her daughter are juxtaposed with a front-page photo of a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Chechnya. While unlikely to turn many heads, this is an entertaining and at times very moving sophomore effort, which pays attention to life's small pleasures and subtle difficulties. (Oct.)
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*Starred Review* In Ras' award-winning debut, Bite Every Sorrow (1998), the ocean's busy edge was the key locus. In her second collection, desert scenes take precedence, and as attuned as Ras is to the dynamism of earth, air, and water, fire is the ruling element here. A homeless man hurls lit matches at passersby; "thin clouds turn into sleek flames," fevers rage, and fires at an oasis "could whirl you clear into the afterlife." Fire is wild and obliterating; fire is also warming, illuminating, sustaining. The book's title is from Emerson--"Everything is made of one hidden stuff"--and Ras detects this mysterious force at work everywhere she looks, from the transubstantiation that water and air so readily perform to dogs barking out their heart's desires on warm nights to the cravings and crimes of humankind. Passionate, frank, and witty, Ras reports on conflagrations personal and archetypal in a warming world perpetually in love and at war. Her bittersweet, immediate, and wise lyrics are long-lined and punctuated with glissandos and unexpected leaps. Tough-minded, funny, and sensuous, Ras' vital poems remind us of all that we're given on this planet and how recklessly we devour it. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143037854
• ISBN 13: 9780143037859
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96