Poetry. "Ralph Angel makes visible the liminal: those almost unbearable states that hover near the threshold of perception. This is a poetics of trace and trance, accident and significance, rightly odd details, and speakers who are 'electrified / by earth shoes, a solitary goat dance, / the weird expanse of parking lots, / glittering, peopled with loneliness.' Angel combines the drop-dead nonchalance of film noir, the cool jazz of Chet Baker, and epiphanies of demise when he writes 'it takes / practice to get lost, paint with our own hair, burrow deeply / into shadows of flesh coming undone at the seams.' He eavesdrops on the American psyche and retrieves the somatic residue of speech within the dream-defiled paradise that is Southern California. In the absence of satiation, he makes a haven of longing. I am intoxicated by the fine strangeness of his work"--Alice Fulton.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
A fully realized book of poems--which is just what Ralph Angels award winning new volume, Neither World, is performs a strange feat of magic. It both evokes a landscape thats already there, describing some chosen portion of the outer world, and takes us to a new interior dimension of that landscape. The poets city is a real place full of cafes and traffic, alleys and shops but it is an imagined one as well, and one of the pleasures of urban poetry is seeing the ways in which a poet makes a city his or her own.... His best work... creates whole voices, voices spinning out a kind of comedy that belongs unmistakably to the late 20th century.... Angel's poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and theyre fresh with how it feels to live right now. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 25, 1996, Reviewed by Mark Doty
Reviewers today are too quick to hail meandering, loosely organized poetry with the claim that its rhythms and movements recall those of jazz. Tried conventions of one art do not necessarily spell success when applied to another, no matter how knowingly, and no matter how warmly we welcome the idea. (Past adoptions of a jazz sensibility have brought us such brilliance as William Matthew's "Mood Indigo.") In many of the poems found in Neither World, the speaker's eye lights on no one object long enough to trust, words slink down the page with the feeling of subterfuge, thought gets scattershot: "Admit it. We've let each other down. And then,/ congratulations. We knew exactly what would happen./The canvas shoes and warm Cokes./Those great, dull buildings . . . ." These leaps and vacillations might tickle early on, but randomness eventually numbs. We long for a purpose, a noteworthy principle other than riff.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
What most North American poets writing in the surrealist tradition seem not to notice about the European surrealists of the early part of the century is their devotion to both Freud and Marx. Originally surrealism looked both inward for dream-truth, and outword--insisting that what was found inside radicalize the social reality. Though Angel is neither Freudian nor Marxist, he is like, say James Tate with a cause, or Lorca, wandering nihilistic Los Angeles, a contemporary surrealist poet rooted beautifully in both this world and that world.... Neither World, winner of the 1995 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, is an exhilarating, heartbreaking, deliciously subversive place. It's where Lorca lived: a brave and crazy world where 'Even the one who's picked up unconscious is resisting arrest.' -- The Antioch Review
Reviewers today are too quick to hail meandering, loosely organized poetry with the claim that its rhythms and movements recall those of jazz. Tried conventions of one art do not necessarily spell success when applied to another, no matter how knowingly, and no matter how warmly we welcome the idea. (Past adoptions of a jazz sensibility have brought us such brilliance as William Matthew's "Mood Indigo.") In many of the poems found in Neither World, the speaker's eye lights on no one object long enough to trust, words slink down the page with the feeling of subterfuge, thought gets scattershot: "Admit it. We've let each other down. And then,/ congratulations. We knew exactly what would happen./The canvas shoes and warm Cokes./Those great, dull buildings . . . ." These leaps and vacillations might tickle early on, but randomness eventually numbs. We long for a purpose, a noteworthy principle other than riff.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
What most North American poets writing in the surrealist tradition seem not to notice about the European surrealists of the early part of the century is their devotion to both Freud and Marx. Originally surrealism looked both inward for dream-truth, and outword--insisting that what was found inside radicalize the social reality. Though Angel is neither Freudian nor Marxist, he is like, say James Tate with a cause, or Lorca, wandering nihilistic Los Angeles, a contemporary surrealist poet rooted beautifully in both this world and that world.... Neither World, winner of the 1995 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, is an exhilarating, heartbreaking, deliciously subversive place. It's where Lorca lived: a brave and crazy world where 'Even the one who's picked up unconscious is resisting arrest.' -- The Antioch Review
About the Author
Ralph Angel was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1951. He is the author of Twice Removed (Sarabande Books, 2001), Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award, and Anxious Latitudes (1986). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Antioch Review, The American Poetry Review, and many other magazines, and have been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the 90s, and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize, and awards from the Fulbright Foundation and Poetry magazine. Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles and is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Redlands, where he teaches creative writing.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bravely Human and Honest Poetry,
By A Reader (Brookline, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Neither World (Miami University Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Ralph Angel's work is visionary. There is wisdom and soul to be found in these poems.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Unique,
By A Customer
This review is from: Neither World (Miami University Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Ralph Angel can be remembered as a poet who was not afraid to be seedy and romantic. His verbal painting of the cityscape is a talent that is real and genuine. 'It Takes Practice To Get Lost' is a splendid line. Angel does get lost in Neither World and I wish I could have gotten lost with him.
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