Monuments (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Jay Ramsay’s latest collection explodes in ferocious public engagements with a closed world and a private self. The poet who burst on the 1980s scene with Psychic Poetry and the magnificent The White Poem with its extraordinary attentiveness, has developed laterally, with high-impact, high-access tropes, public utterance: a jagged, bloody-minding of his modernist self. Ramsay re-negotiates that in his work as therapist, performer, anthologist and prime mover on the poetry scene. Such adjustments create a ’fertile lack of balance’ in Roy Fuller’s phrase and wrench a uniquely pained - even awkward - frankness. Monuments stretches inner and outer here. From its explosive opening with the afterlife of a suicide bomber through a diary of the Iraq war, the poetry, themes and languages shock into something more radical and engaged than many have seen for years. Its extrovert narrative arc constantly tries to meet what it invokes: politics, risk, the despised spiritual, raw subjects not talked of in English. The Preface echoes this: everything ‘literal’ is also ‘symbolic’—in Yeats’ deployment of such bi-focal vision—with Ramsay’s esoteric immersion. Finally, Monuments is about memory; what needs to be remembered. It nags at the story of our time and this poetry’s willingness to engage with it, while absolutely affirming transcendent reality and his vision of ‘One World People’.