Somehow Balanced

Ralph Stevens’ poems of quiet observation draw on life’s diurnal rhythms. They take in scenes like breaths and when we see as his eyes do, we follow in his poetic acts of sentience. These poems of later life crackle in the stillness of an inner work, still in order to receive what the trees speak. They wait for the field to come inside, listen for imagined voices “hopeful as Hardy’s thrush” with the hope that it is always good to receive the world as it is, to beckon to wilderness, whether it be the river, the rocks, the hyacinth, the mountains, the loons, the crows. To stand watch, to pay attention to the world within and without. To ask questions about the darkness, faith, or silence. To process things as an artist-poet. Ultimately to find solace and shelter.

—Irene Toh, Editor, Red Wolf Editions

How to maintain our sense of self in a world that seems increasingly out of balance? Ralph Stevens has always sought connection with the natural world as a way of creating his own poetic equilibrium. His life, centered in Ellsworth, Maine, would seem perfectly suited. However, one needn’t move “down east” to seek such balance. Here, as Stevens explores the breadth of his consciousness and imagination, we find, as we might expect, the solitary loon, deer grazing, and a broken robin’s egg. But the wonder of Somehow Balanced is where it travels. Here, the raptor might joust with the laundromat; you can find “all the castoff lost forgotten things,/dust-covered shoe, torn lamp shade in a vacant lot.” As Stevens reminds us, “Do we really need the dark/to know the light, and/in what darkness/is love proved?” What a beautiful, resonant question! And Ralph’s answer: “Give us time,/they might have said./It will be dark/ soon enough.”

—Alan Walowitz, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems, Truth Serum Press

Sunrise, Damariscotta