Turning Over the Earth: Poems (Paperback)

by Ralph Black (Author) "Suppose when you least expect it it begins to snow..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York

Editorial Reviews

Review
All Morning About Love
The Assassin
Birds Of Prayer
The Carpenter
A City Letter To The Country
The Creatures Of Home
Eight Months Married, Naked On The Couch, They Watch The Academy..
Elegy For Zac
Essay On Empiricism
If This Were A Poem
John Ruskin Considers The Nature Of Water, %circa 1842
Last Will
Letter To Hugo From The Upper West Side
A Moment With Apples
The Muses Of Farewell
Nightsong On The Salmon River
Notes For A Poem About A Dream About My Daughter In Which Moths ...
October Migration
Parable Of Brother Sorrow
Pilgrimage
Poem For The Sleeper
Red Fox, My Daughter
Slicing Ginger
Three Questions
Toward A Theory Of Harmonics
Triangulating Home
Turning Over The Earth
Waiting For The Bus
What Faith
Woodfire
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Description
With nods to Brahms and Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, Ralph Black's poems tell of a passion for being in the world, a desire to make meaningful contact with the sensuous, both natural and human. With beautifully accessible imagery, Black explores the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street - amazed "that the world, even / this one, can offer / so little and / so much at once / and mean them both?" (from the book)

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; 1st edition (December 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571314113
• ISBN-13: 978-1571314116
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,116,818 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our New Pastoral Poet, December 14, 2001

By	Kevin Clark (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, engaging, and wonderfully recommendable poetry, October 14, 2001

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars The best first book of poems since Robert Hass, October 16, 2003

By	Alfred E. Guy Jr. "onela22" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.