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Handsomely
designed and produced, This Wine by William M. Ramsey
offers a purposefully arranged sequence of eighty-four haiku
and senryu presented one to a page. Most of the poems stand
well alone, and many are of the quality one would expect
to find in a good anthology or a selection of the poet’s
best work. Read collectively and in order, as Ramsey intends
for them to be, they are slivers of life that form a compelling
narrative.
The
book is divided into three parts. The first, “A Hand’s
Warmth,” begins
no
love
in the sea or stars
your hand’s warmth
and
shares momentary glimpses of human intimacy shattered by
the agony of an infant son’s death.
autumn
rain
my still boy’s blue lips
open
•
my
mouth
the pistol barrel’s mouth
round
In
Section 2, “As I Eat Shrimp,” the poet looks outward,
conveying his perceptions with uncompromising honesty.
the
dead boy
on a Rwandan road
as i eat shrimp
•
fast
food line
in front of me twenty
nameless buttocks
•
through
a lens
the silent carnage
of amoebas
•
firing
squad:
all at once
the separate slumps
The
poems in the final division, “The Wheat Field,”
draw upon the assimilated experiences of the earlier material
and let us glimpse the poet’s recognition of his connection
to human history and the cycles and things of the natural
world. Healing is hard-won and incomplete, yet effectively
suggested.
slave
cemetery
i scrape the moss to find
no name
•
where’s
joy?
rasps the cricket—
deep autumn night
•
harvest
moon
my ashes
still wrapped in flesh
•
picking
up a stone
to rub
its silence
William
Ramsey's unique voice commands respect. This Wine focuses
on difficult material and shows both the author and the
haikai genre capable of treating it with unflinching authenticity.
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