Lost Wax: Poems

Experiential, analytic, and haunting, the work of Heather Ramsdell is perceptually acute and sensually resonant.

James Tate picked this first volume for the annual National Poetry Series, and it shares with him an absurdist sensibility expressed in angular diction and skewed syntax. But Ramsdells taut and bloodless poems play with space (on the page) and perspective in a manner far more stringent than Tates jauntier verse. She erases words mid-poem, drops letters in words and subjects in sentences, and ends poems in medias resher relentless abstraction is relieved by things in and of themselves: a shoe, a sock, a shirt. The random accretions and surrealism of ordinary objects lead, in Service of Pointing, to word piles and splicings, as in a film, though clearly not a Hollywood movie. Ramsdells avant-garde aesthetic, to which she clings with great integrity, discovers grace in bricks and mere gravity; shes always on the verge of something, and at a given moment her forms finds themselves, but nothing comes close to resolution or statement. A tourist unable to offer direction is an apt trope for these austere, cryptic poems, which most resemble the later Beckett in their singularity of non-vision. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Behind a mannered, sleek prosody that spills across the page in ragged line-breaks and odd gaps between words, the poems of this fine, austere debut are composed of simple objectsAthe color red, the shirt stain, the deceptively simple pronoun. And as in minimalist painting, Ramsdell's patterns of small objects and sounds gather into insistent, affective works: "look/ at it look at it. I// ran all the way to tell you this./ This world is manageable." The poems have a passion for control ("opened spontaneously/ opened in response to verbal stimuli/ opened in response to pain/ did not open"), showing the influence of Ann Lauterbach and, typographically, of Susan Howe. But, like them, Ramsdell leaves room for the charged, out-of-control proliferation of feelings and speech ("Each time I opened my mouth it was already public, something had happened to it like blood leaving a wound...") and an indirect, wary feminism. Selected by James Tate for the annual multi-sponsor, multi-volume National Poetry Series, this first book marks further recognition for the edgy poetics represented in Talisman's New (American) Poets anthology (Forecasts, Feb 23), and for a poet of oblique, startling resources.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.