Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 382
- Language: English
- Date Published: November, 2018
- ISBN: 978-1-948017-14-5
Praise
Praise for Ravenna Diagram volume one:
This is an extraordinary poetry. Classical and avant-garde. Delicate and extreme. Full of planetary music, important signal from the Milky Way. —Grzegorz Wróblewski
Using the most bardic of forms (his “flinty path from the old song”), Henry Gould writes in, through, and beyond poetic tradition. “It Must Give Pleasure,” Wallace Stevens told us, and Gould paid attention. Ravenna Diagram is a rich, expansive, radically inclusive love letter to the natural world, to poetry, to the strange joy of shaping experience. —Kathleen Ossip
Ravenna Diagram etches a remarkably sustained act of imaginative musicality that masques its aspirations as a dynamic spiritual investigation. In these elegant quatrains everything is given expression, everything is encompassed. —Patrick Pritchett
Alight and turn body and soul toward this rare and entirely singular collection. Inside its rich lattice of haunting loss – a silver-footed Beatrice, and intuition couples to its sequitur – insight, all phosphoresce in Ravenna Diagram. Germane within this planetarium, nearing the horizon of each page, discover an ace and an intimate pillow of dreams in concert with Gould’s bewitching interplay of dignity and purpose. —Lissa Wolsak
In the love that moves everything, which is also the final goal of Gould’s extraordinary poem, driven by memories of a dead cousin, Juliet, by Pound’s prompting to make things cohere, by the riven, unfinished history of America, a vision of justice not fully achieved, Ravenna Diagram finds a resolution. –Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements
The poetry of Henry Gould is not for the faint of heart, it is a poetry you must work for, a poetry akin to Hart Crane and Ezra Pound in its intricacies, deeply lyrical and panoramic. —Reyes Cardenas
Excerpt
RHODOS-COLOSSUS
I’ve spun a zigzag ziggurat
not made with hands, muttered
Oblomov-Hobo – squared
round Galilee with palmy lariat
lime-green & violet. With Okeanos
built a pineland font,
a Big Rook Candle Mint
that floats majestic Liberty to Rus
by U.S. Forest Service (Lincoln
would). There’s still life
in a copper penny, if
you’re willing to be leaf – we can.
Disenchanted materialists
unlock a spiny Jenny
idle now for many –
Berkeley’s little tree twists
like Atlantic rotor, like Bermuda
paddleboat… clap hands
& sing, who understands!
A dream – dream-songe (Ojibwa)!
Great Manitou be Hole-in-the-Sky now,
mind – love’s apple-tree
a laurel (Victory).
She beams from the heart of Notre
Dame, my voyageur, extending her
green crystalline moss-
copper palm of sobornost –
Rhodos-Colossus 56 (soul harbor).
9.16.16
Author
Henry Gould’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in various journals. He maintains a poetry website called HG Poetics (hgpoetics.blogspot.com). His books include Stone (Copper Beech Press, 1979) and Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000); he also co-edited an anthology in honor of poet and scholar Edwin Honig, titled A Glass of Green Tea – With Honig (1994, distr. by Fordham U.P.), and edited a volume of Honig’s collected poems, Time & Again, Poems 1940-1997 (XLibris). After living for many years in Providence, RI, he recently returned to his hometown, Minneapolis.
