The Last Skin

May 15, 2010
Walt Whitman Award winner Ras's third collection (after "One Hidden Stuff") features elegies, love poems, and poems about the everyday and the exotic, including several about Krakw, one about Alaska"Sitka, Graveyard"and an entire section devoted to Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes. What makes these poems so captivating is that Ras is both a thinking and a feeling poet: "Frailty everywhere, in the loops/ of blood traveling 12,000 miles of veins a day." The travelog poems reveal a discriminating eye that examines the intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and metaphors are Ras's strong suit ("the lake's obsessive licking"). Occasionally, though, she includes a too familiar phrase (e.g., "ghost of a chance"). Her love for the long, extended sentence can work well, as in the one-page, one-sentence "Pigeons, a Love Poem," but the three long sentences in "Ventriloquism" careen around various topics and slow the poem's pulse. Ras is best when she celebrates life's small wonders, as she does for irises: "We walked silently, numb to their braggadocios/ their arias, their manic flutes." VERDICT A very accomplished collection that will intrigue and surprise; for most readers of contemporary poetry.Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

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April 1, 2010
Now a Guggenheim fellow, Ras writes with verve, steeped anger, and sharp grief in her third ringing collection. Painterly and analytical, she is enraptured by sky, land, and water as well as by the ambience of the ever-morphing mindscape. In the arresting title poem, the poet mourns for her mother even as she discerns within her own body her mothers cell-deep presence. In Seven, a wry eight-part poem weaving autobiographical highlights with crisp commentary, Ras riffs, Yes, no, maybethe unending cha-cha-cha / of consciousness. Pirouetting between wonder and fury as she travels to Lake Titicaca high in the Andes and haunted Poland, Ras writes with piercing clarity and piquant extrapolation about bombs and firing neurons; cemeteries and a palm reading; eavesdropping and how a train becomes a dream, a ghost transport, and the rapidly turning pages of a life while within us there is blood traveling 12,000 miles of veins a day. In the ravishing Washing the Elephant, Ras takes measure of memorys critical mass and strange omissions. Exceptional on all counts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)