Bite Every Sorrow: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) - Softcover

Ras, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807122645 ISBN 13: 9780807122648

Publisher: LSU Press, 1998

Synopsis

"This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning." -- C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"
Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:"

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fled

Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone -- how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Ras 's poems have appeared in Boulevard, American Scholar, the Massachusetts Review, Orion, and many other magazines. She now directs Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas.

Reviews

Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious." Highly recommended for all public libraries.?Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807122645
• ISBN 13: 9780807122648
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88