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Turning Over the Earth: Poems

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In Ralph Black's Turning Over the Earth, a reader has to be struck by the reflective human sensibility regularly intensified by the poet's recognition of the limits of both metaphysics and human perception. Unlike the formalized relentless neutrality of
Frost and the contemporary transcendent eruptions of Kinnell-or even the bemused appreciations of Stevens-these poems demonstrate human feeling deepened by a world that is circumscribed by politics, crass suburbanization, and the unpredictable horrors nature itself can afford in the form of predation and disaster. It's as if Ralph Black is revising our notion of the pastoral poet. This is an excellent book because it gives reading pleasure in the recitation of its melodies and in the smart accounting of the poet's concerns...especially as those concerns traverse the ecology of land and psyche.

Turning Over The Earth is a superbly presented anthology showcasing the witty, engaging, and wonderfully recommendable poetry of Ralph Black. The subject matter draws from a wide range of inspirations based on city life and the countryside, on music, nature, history, and personal experiences both common and uncommon. A Moment With Apples: It is rain agin./Is rain becoming/a mirror along/black stretches of road/winding through a country/that explodes/with the red of apples/at every turn./It is rain glazing/the apples before they fall,/glazing the red glaze/of apples, which hang there,/silent, almost breathing,/feeling the change of/season move around/the shapes they make/in the unpronounceable air,/as if a pair of hands/moving that way,/almost touching, could/tell us something/we have no other way/of knowing.

Black's sensitivities are acute, and his language quiet, and to read Turning Over the Earth is to constantly mix both recognition and surprise in equal and simultaneous doses. Read it if you love contemporary poetry, or read it if you love the truth. You will think like a poet for days afterwards.