Wake (Iowa Poetry Prize)
Wake (Iowa Poetry Prize) by Bin Ramke
English | Mar. 1, 1999 | ISBN: 0877456585 | 132 Pages | PDF | 5 MB
English | Mar. 1, 1999 | ISBN: 0877456585 | 132 Pages | PDF | 5 MB
Throughout Bin Ramke's book of poems, certain elements recur insistently: birds and boyhood, betrayal, and longings that careen between flesh and faith. The poet does not pretend to offer wisdom but instead offers words.
The world fleshed forth in oil paint, from Giotto to Joseph Albers, is meticulously essayed in the mixed-genre ekphraseis of Swensen's sixth full-length collection since 1984. Though the medieval and early Renaissance tableaux she focuses on are almost entirely composed in the restricted vocabulary of Christian iconography, Swensen regards them with a worldly eye, using her role as "translator" of the worksAfrom religious past to secular present, from image to textAto explore an ethics of human immanence. Addressing herself to one in a countless string of mid-millenium representations of "the Flight into Egypt," for instance, Swensen finds "that the holy family enters not a heavenly but a very worldly world, a world just like ours except that it's not and that it can't be reached."