Like the ancient medical text by Hippocrates that gives this book its title, Airs, Waters, Places looks with intensity and purpose at the elemental world to understand the possibility of an expanded notion of health in an often disconnected and disconnecting social order. In the poet's words, “To call language a nervous system might be useful: if each sentient being is analogous to cells within the organism, language is analogous to the nerves as well as the messages sent along those nerves. There is, there, if not eternity, at least delusion. This is a book of various appetites in constant motion.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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The translucent transience of life flowing has seldom been more poignantly and pertinently evoked. -- John Ashbery
With exacting energies, these poems test measure, test mind itself against real death. This is permanent poetry. -- Donald Revell, author of There Are Three and Beautiful Shirt
With exacting energies, these poems test measure, test mind itself against real death. This is permanent poetry. -- Donald Revell, author of There Are Three and Beautiful Shirt
About the Author
Bin Ramke has published six previous books of poems, including Massacre of the Innocents and Wake (Iowa, 1995 and 1999). The editor of the Denver Quarterly, he teaches creative writing at the University of Denver.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A poet of growing importance,
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This review is from: Airs, Waters, Places (Kuhl House Poets) (Paperback)
Bin Ramke has become a more indispensable poet with each recent book. Massacre of the Innocents was impressive in its blending of philosophical and poetic investigation, and Wake was leagues beyond that volume, especially in the way that it brought the authorial voice into dialogue with all the discourses that surround and produce that voice.Airs, Waters, Places is a further leap beyond Wake; a truly amazing accomplishment. Its interweaving of science, history, literary reference and quotation, mythology, and personal experience is stunning--the mosaic effects reveal and produce new relations among its topics and its topoi. And Ramke's capacity to spool out a lyric thread over such extended arcs arouses both my admiration and my envy. Besides the sparkling ideas and structural complexity of these poems, the lush and intoxicating language is a marvelously sensuous experience in itself. Airs, Waters, Places provides proof, if such proof were needed, that the purest lyricism can cohabit with the most rigorous intellect, each lending strength and depth to the other.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who's yo' daddy?,
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This review is from: Airs, Waters, Places (Kuhl House Poets) (Paperback)
The poetry of Bin Ramke is extremely fresh. I can think of no poet living or dead who is doing or has done what he does. Blending dreamscape and scientific fact into a seamless meditation, Ramke explores his understanding of reality using extended metaphors that collide, ramble, bunch up and then move on. Yet, for all the facts in a Ramke poem, he resists utterly the temptation to draw conclusions. It's almost as if he is positively averse to them. He wants the reader to work that part out.His poetry is basically prose poetry without any narrative sense. That is, much of it could be read backwards or forwards with equal appreciation. I know of no precursor to this body of work. It is truly unique.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
pretty interesting,
By I X Key "burningfield" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Airs, Waters, Places (Kuhl House Poets) (Paperback)
Reading this book I felt like he started with one amazing metaphor to establish in the book that he could think of good metaphors. But then after that there aren't any in here. It really is an incredible metaphor that makes perfect sense, but after setting me up to want more metaphors, there just aren't really any. Or aren't many. Some of the writing is pretty interesting. It's so saturated with quotes from other fancy books he's read that it's hard to tell sometimes what's a quote & what's his own writing. I guess that's a way to weave yourself into literary history. He has some free association in here that isn't so exciting, for me. The forms of these poems is crazy; that's fun, but a lot of other avant-garde poets are a lot more interesting to me.
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