Ever is a collection of poems begun at the turn of the 21st century, composed and revised through the beginning of the year 2013. In this, his 7th collection and his first following Waterblind: New & Selected Poems (2002), Ralph Adamo writes about and through wars, hurricanes, issues as common and profound as work and time, and endurance of every sort. He writes as well as about becoming a father after age 50 and raising two children in a time of transition and conflict. The patterns and forms of these poems vary from tightly controlled couplets through prose poetry and various experimental turns of language. At times painfully lucid, at times opaque, often simultaneously personal and universal, Adamo’s poems seek that most elusive goal: truth as far as language can pursue it, and while truth may remain unfathomable and inexpressible, these poems never waver in their seeking.
Praise for Ralph Adamo and Ever
An I relays the story in its not-story way. With traces of story. The sound is uniquely of its city in a nearly, not-named way. Attuned to its humidfied breezes and the fan blade’s indispensable turning. Home is the sole locale, the nucleus, ever so. The voice struggles ‘to end its own noise,’ not to inventory only regrets and losses, rattled and battered; cycling through the dead, friends and kin, pictures, ‘the stalactites of memory’ and bars in which years must have passed, stumbled through, a survivor, “godly,/of one mind, learning too late whatever/was on offer, outlasting fabulous destinies…” A work, a worksong, not of an illusory life, but of a life, in a body, a family, on wheels, rubber-side down, that works, miraculously.
—C.D. Wright, author of One With Others, National Book Critics Circle Award winner.
These are the poems of man who has become his city. To be sure, the jazz, the floods, the drunks, and the turbulence of despair are here, but they exist in the words of one who has absorbed them into himself. If “the blinked-smile the non-survivor wears / toward peace” describes one overwhelmed by it all, Adamo, ever looking forward, brings comfort, like words whispered in the ear of a drowsy child.
—R.S. (Sam) Gwynn, author of No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000.
Reading Ralph Adamo’s poetry puts you in a courtly brooding world where the truth comes driving through the gloom like elegance. You picture him “standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” as E.M. Forster described Cavafy.
—Nancy Lemann, author of Lives of the Saints and Ritz of the Bayou.
What may be most original and satisfying about the thirteen years of poems in Ever is that reading and rereading them is to experience the art and diverse craft of a master, one who would wince at the accolade and never accept it.
—Randy Bates, author of Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter.
In Ever, Ralph Adamo has focused his poetic lens on the small moments that make life bittersweet and profound. Whether he is describing the banter of children at play or words uttered on a deathbed, Adamo puts the reader in the room and hands him a magnifying glass. The poet is asking us to watch life closely as it swiftly passes.
—Fatima Shaik, author of Melitte and On Mardi Gras Day.
Ralph Adamo has published six previous collections of poems, and won numerous awards including an NEA Fellowship and a Katrina Media Fellowship. He has taught at six universities in Louisiana since 1989, also in a middle school for the arts. Before that, he worked as a journalist, a television writer, and a jazz archivist, and a very inept carpenter’s-assistant, among other occupations, following his MFA degree from the University of Arkansas in the early 1970s. At Arkansas he was a classmate of C.D. Wright and R.S. Gwynn, among others, and came to know legendary Ozark poet Frank Stanford. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals since 1968. He edited the independent New Orleans journal Barataria Review in the 70s, Loyola University's New Orleans Review in the 90s, and currently edits Xavier Review at Xavier University of Louisiana, where is an associate professor of English. He is married to Kay Toca, with whom he raises their children, Jack and Lily.
