Samson's Riddle [ Uncorrected Page Proof]

Ratti, John

Act Of Faith
Afternoon Light
Answers And Questions
Centipede
Curve
The End Of Sackett Street
Essential Shapes
Firethorn
Freshmen
Gulf Coast Dialogue
House Of Wood
Inside, Outside, And Beyond
Kite-song
Knowing And Not Knowing
Metaphor
More And Less
Nocturne
One Winter Night Many Years Ago
Orpheus
Passage
Praying Mantis
Reflecting Metal Spheroids
Samson's Riddle
Seal
Self
Spanish Influenza
Spindle
Stargazer
Stubbs The Horse-painter
Sunflower
Tibet
What I Knew About My Father Was He Worked
When Emmie Came Down The Road
White Turnips
You See
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

John Ratti, author of A Remembered Darkness and Memorial Day (Viking), writes here of family and childhood, of flowers, trees, insects, and stars, of music, of sex" exploitation, and of metaphor and its meanings. His tone is nostalgic, inquiring, skeptical; his themes are ambiguous in their shifts from belief to resignation to cynicism. He is a poet exploring, without dogma or narrow passion, his past, his world, and himself and discovering moments of beauty, human connection, and terror. His vision achieves felicitous ironies: "For a moment/ the secret name you have for yourself/ Surfaces,/ oil floating on water, / shines across your mouth and your torso... and then folds silently / into the darkness / and the night / as if it had never been said." His diction can be strongly charged (a ship's rigging "bristles" into the sky) and his imagery vividly evocative (a stone wall cuts like a "jagged fin" across a field of snow). And he can lead a passage of the most ordinary language into an intense, startling image: "First you run with it riding behind you on a short string, feeling the shape of it tugging in tight light gasps, already moving towards freedom. Then you feel the wind take it and you turn quickly, running backwards, paying out the string fast as the wind demands. It shivers once or twice with a tissue thin buzz and then mounts rapidly, taking the string like blood from the pumping heart of your hands."("Kite Song") But Ratti's work also comes close, sometimes, to banality, in diffused cadences and inexact diction. It does not convey a powerful central rhythm or intuited patterns of sound. And like so much contemporary American poetry it often lacks a sure grasp of the form it seeks-of beginnings, middles, and ends, and of what should be left out. The stanza of "Kite Song" quoted above is preceded by eight lines on constructing a kite and followed by three stating the point of the poem. The stanza alone is a perfect poem. Samson ~ Riddle is an honest, unpretentious, readable, but uneven book, with clear perceptions and moving passages but an uncertain craftsmanship. It is recommended for large and complete collections of American poetry. -- From Independent Publisher