Monuments

Jay Ramsay’s latest collection explodes in ferocious public engagements with a
closed world and a private self. The poet who burst on the 1980s scene with Psychic
Poetry and the magnificent The White Poem with its extraordinary attentiveness,
has developed laterally, with high-impact, high-access tropes, public
a jagged, bloody-minding of his modernist self. Ramsay re-negotiates that in his
work as therapist, performer, anthologist and prime mover on the poetry scene. Such
adjustments create a ’fertile lack of balance’ in Roy Fuller’s phrase and wrench a
uniquely pained - even awkward - frankness.
Monuments stretches inner and outer here. From its explosive opening with the
afterlife of a suicide bomber through a diary of the Iraq war, the poetry, themes and
languages shock into something more radical and engaged than many have seen for
years. Its extrovert narrative arc constantly tries to meet what it politics,
risk, the despised spiritual, raw subjects not talked of in English.
The Preface echoes everything ‘literal’ is also ‘symbolic’—in Yeats’ deployment
of such bi-focal vision—with Ramsay’s esoteric immersion. Finally, Monuments is
about memory; what needs to be remembered. It nags at the story of our time and
this poetry’s willingness to engage with it, while absolutely affirming transcendent
reality and his vision of ‘One World People’.