ISBN 978-1-935084-55-6
\n102 pages: $16.00
\nNovember, 2014<\/p>\n
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Ever<\/em>\u00a0is a collection of poems begun at the turn of the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century, composed and revised through the beginning of the year 2013. In this, his 7th<\/sup>\u00a0collection and his first following\u00a0Waterblind: New & Selected Poems<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>(2002), Ralph Adamo writes about and through wars, hurricanes, issues as common and profound as work and time, and endurance of every sort. He writes as well as about becoming a father after age 50 and raising two children in a time of transition and conflict. The patterns and forms of these poems vary from tightly controlled couplets through prose poetry and various experimental turns of language. At times painfully lucid, at times opaque, often simultaneously personal and universal, Adamo\u2019s poems seek that most elusive goal: truth as far as language can pursue it, and while truth may remain unfathomable and inexpressible, these poems never waver in their seeking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n An\u00a0I<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0relays the story in its not-story way. With traces of story. The sound is uniquely of its city in a nearly, not-named way. Attuned to its humidfied breezes and the fan blade\u2019s indispensable turning. Home is the sole locale, the nucleus, ever so. The voice struggles \u2018to end its own noise,\u2019 not to inventory only regrets and losses, rattled and battered; cycling through the dead, friends and kin, pictures, \u2018the stalactites of memory\u2019 and bars in which years must have passed, stumbled through, a survivor, \u201cgodly,\/of one mind, learning too late whatever\/was on offer, outlasting fabulous destinies\u2026\u201d A work, a worksong, not of an illusory life, but of a life, in a body, a family, on wheels, rubber-side down, that works, miraculously. <\/p>\n Ralph Adamo has lived his three-score-plus years in New Orleans.\u00a0 To say that the poems in\u00a0Ever<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0are about that city of the dead, the dying, and the coming-to-be would be a great disservice.\u00a0 These are the poems of man who has become his city.\u00a0 To be sure, the jazz, the floods, the drunks, and the turbulence of despair are here, but they exist in the words of one who has absorbed them into himself. If \u201cthe blinked-smile the non-survivor wears \/ toward peace\u201d describes one overwhelmed by it all, Adamo, ever looking forward, brings comfort, like words whispered in the ear of a drowsy child. <\/p>\n Reading Ralph Adamo\u2019s poetry puts you in a courtly brooding world where the truth comes driving through the gloom like elegance. You picture him \u201cstanding absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,\u201d as E.M. Forster described Cavafy. <\/p>\n For more than forty years, while \u201carguing words against \/ The constant threat: forgetting,\u201d Ralph Adamo has published poems as original as any I know. In his seventh collection, Ever, in which sometimes \u201ca word is as far from a fact \/ as fever can burn it,\u201d a speaker whittles \u201cthe little lies down to \/ The nuance of perfect teeth in a closed mouth.\u201d Another speaker whispers to his young children, \u201cMy children are exhausting\u201d and \u201c\u2019riddle\u2019 means \u2018dark language\u2019\u201d in order to help spirit them to bed. In another poem, retrospection makes a speaker \u201csag like an old bookshelf and sigh like the door beyond it.\u201d And in another, a speaker prays for adolescent boys in their lostness\u2014\u201cworld without hearing, amen.\u201d Such phrasings hint at greater recognitions to come\u2014for instance, that poetry is \u201cjust listening to the world.\u201d What may be most original and satisfying about the thirteen years of poems in Ever is that reading and rereading them is to experience the art and diverse craft of a master, one who would wince at the accolade and never accept it. <\/p>\n In\u00a0Ever<\/em><\/strong>, Ralph Adamo has focused his poetic lens on the small moments that make life bittersweet and profound. Whether he is describing the banter of children at play or words uttered on a deathbed, Adamo puts the reader in the room and hands him a magnifying glass. The poet is asking us to watch life closely as it swiftly passes.<\/p>\n He gives very specific metaphors of pain, familiar to any New Orleanian \u201clike stinging caterpillars down from ghostly cocoons en masse to prey on the bare feet of us all.\u201d The book contains many precisely chosen words and well-considered passages. But he also offers some less concrete, more esoteric and slightly sardonic observations \u201cSome things have always fallen through time and space to land god knows where.\u201d<\/p>\n Adamo writes confidently about the value in dysfunction and skeptically about pure redemption. \u201cI was going to get older someday. I was going to blame somebody.\u201d Sometimes the work seems so personal that it should be reworked in the reader\u2019s mind. In \u201cVisiting the Marker, After the Flood,\u201d the narrator asks \u201cWhat did you expect to happen clawing through the chicken wire at the top of the 20th century.\u201d To understand this poem about death and life, the reader must step back and watch the words flow past.<\/p>\n Adamo\u2019s narrator laments the people who have disappeared without ceremony. He names them in a list broken by undisguised feelings \u2013 among them that he cannot properly remember all the names. But the spirits of the dead emerge and disappear throughout the book, allowing readers the experience of tangible and fleeting memories too.<\/p>\n Written in dense beautiful language,\u00a0Ever<\/em>\u00a0is about temporal, conscious and self-conscious experiences. Underlying\u00a0Ever<\/em>\u00a0is a question of whether we will find the perfect afterlife. This is a book without any neat, simple answers. Still, Adamo seems to be telling us that happily ever after, our\u00a0Ever<\/em>, is here.<\/p>\n \u2014Fatima Shaik<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Melitte<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0On Mardi Gras Day<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ralph Adamo
\n
\n\u2014C.D. Wright,<\/strong>\u00a0author of\u00a0One With Others<\/strong><\/em>, National Book Critics Circle Award winner.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014R.S. (Sam) Gwynn<\/strong>, author of\u00a0No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Nancy Lemann<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Lives of the Saints<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Ritz of the Bayou<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Randy Bates<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n
\n9781935084556
\nA work, a worksong\u2026 that works, miraculously. \u2014C.D. Wright<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[16],"product_tag":[55,18,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-154","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-lavender-ink","7":"product_tag-new-orleans","8":"product_tag-poetry","9":"product_tag-ralph-adamo","11":"first","12":"instock","13":"taxable","14":"shipping-taxable","15":"purchasable","16":"product-type-simple","17":"berocket_lgv_grid","18":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"\n