LOST WAX: Poems (National Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Heather Ramsdell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998 | Series: National Poetry Series

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

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Kirkus Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; First Edition edition (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252067061
• ISBN-13: 978-0252067068
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,374,647 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars extraordinary formal elegance and great title wow!, October 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: LOST WAX: Poems (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

This book is among the most difficult and lovely, the most austere and elegant... Sentences are spliced and skewed, language games are revolved, resolved, dissolved; or torn apart. Very pretty in its sheer wordness; very beautiful, intense, bizarre, brave. A powerful gesture. Grand, grand.