Description
This book engages a childhood among rivers, take steps into the river-like world at large, then turns to (hopes for) metamorphosis. Transitions are marked but with primitive signs, such as the visual dimensions of number—a concern that keeps arising as the poems ask how abstractions differ from matter. They also ask how perception turns into memory, and what is lost when this happens. Much of this world wants to remain invisible, but invisibilities interact: light and wind and water engage each other (air plus water equals cloud). Light and transparency figure in every poem in this book, while the book as a whole deals with memory as fluid, transitory, illuminating. An illusion.
Words are mechanical—they have functions—and sentences are machines. In Light Wind Light Light, Bin Ramke seems intent on transcending the notion of “single use”—his poems expand fractically, rhizomatically, in multiple dimensions and qualities. I have long thought of him as one of those poets working in the lyric mode who mistrusts that tendency of the lyric to tie off all its loose ends; in Ramke’s book the “lyric” is music—its desire is not to fix a position but to echo, to resound. Rather than argument, invitation and engagement are the rhetoric in play.
Kazim Ali
Ardent and indelible, spare as the bones of a bird, these artifacts of an acute sensibility are sparked by the resurgent memories of infancy: forest and bees, river and fish, storm and rain, puddle and sky—all this of no consequence; all this of vital significance.
I was the child there watching.
Rikki Ducornet
These poems contain the curves, ratios, relations, laws, and forces that describe existence and bind thing to thing, the fact of which, we might say, constitutes reality: self to word, law to light or sun or moon, wind to breath, not just physically but also through the furthering force of metaphor. In this world, all surfaces are in intimate communication, inviting us to “[walk] out to be there breathless” amidst its glorious connections. Ramke’s gift, given to the reader again and again, is in how he traces the fragility and glow of living movement, like gold coursing through thought.
Eleni Sikelianos
Engaging a childhood among rivers, Ramke takes steps into the riverlike world at large, and then turns to (or hopes for) metamorphosis. Ramke’s latest deals with memory as fluid, transitory, and illuminating.
Incantatory sounds seduce the reader away from investigating the poet’s anxieties of influence, as the poet comes to know better in every sense of the phrase. For all Ramke’s immersion in his past, he cannot unlearn his mathematical training, nor would readers want him to. He delights as much in sharing the concept of “subitizing” (“To know how many without counting”) as the reader may in discovering a new model of reading: ecstatic intuition.
Ramke marshals theorems and axioms and philosophic thought to get at questions of inheritance and identity, not as intellectual ballast but as a means to shape his materials into significant forms. . . . Ramke does more than renounce, which would be too easy for a poet of his caliber; he claims and looks for pathways of complexity that cast an X-ray on the architecture of intolerance.
