One Hidden Stuff

by Barbara Ras

Overview

Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras's poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what's cherished to what's lost, from culture to nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143037859
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/26/2006
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Barbara Ras’s first book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, won the Walt Whitman Award in 1997 and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is currently the director of the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.

Editorial Reviews

Barbara Ras's poems are informed by a metaphysically erudite and whimsical exuberance. (C.K. Williams)

From the Publisher

Beginning with a full moon and ending with "the petals/ of where we belong," this second collection takes on the clich s and mysteries of daily life moving, loss, dogs, happiness in hopes of finding what underlies them. Ras, whose debut, Bite Every Sorrow (1998), won the Whitman and Kate Tufts Discovery Awards, is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, approaching them mostly in a ragged, long-lined free verse that gathers steam as it moves down the page. Many of the small pleasures of these poems speed by like scenery in a train window. A speaker finds a seashell "the size of a large speck" and wonders about its ocean sound "and what kind of ear it would take to hear it." But the "small beauties" have little chance against larger historical forces, like a U.S. military campaign called "Operation Menu"; two cloud-gazing friends come across "the kind of billowings that could only be called atomic." Politics and the pain of familial relationships are often fused, as when a mother's thoughts about her daughter are juxtaposed with a front-page photo of a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Chechnya. While unlikely to turn many heads, this is an entertaining and at times very moving sophomore effort, which pays attention to life's small pleasures and subtle difficulties. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Ras shows her mastery of the sound of language in this second book, after the Walt Whitman Award-winning Bite Every Sorrow. Reading these poems, one thinks of the image from Yeats: "O body swayed to music" ("Among School Children"). The music here is the sound of Ras's long, graceful, and flowing lines. Propelled by alliteration, assonance, consonance, and exquisite verbs, the poems have a breathless tone and resemble interior monologs as they touch on the small occurrences of daily life like dogs, children, breakfast, everything from dreams to weeds. Generally light and playful, most of the poems have serious undercurrents that add a sense of soulfulness, although none of them feels religious. A few try to cover too much territory: in "Elsewhere," the poet mourns her deceased mother while making political statements against the government and war. Sacrificing depth for breadth, the poem winds up saying too little. But that is an exception. Ras's poems, like Yeats's dancer, will be long remembered. Recommended for all libraries.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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