A Review and an Interview of Lawrence Raab’s April at the Ruins
April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab
Review by Marina Brown
Interview by Tiffany Troy
Publication Date: 4/1/2022
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Product Number: 9781946482655
ISBN: 978-1-946482-65-5
Pages: 104
Celebrated poet and professor Lawrence Raab’s tenth collection of poetry is one of mysterious and visionary sight, quiet music, and the unaffected stillness of reflection that is common to masterpieces capable of holding their potency for generations.
Raab’s poems sometimes come across as rearranged parables or solitary musings that have been turned, for the contemplative and philosophical reader, into dreamlike landscapes. Composed with strong structural integrity, the short-line stanzas unfurl like fables, their emotion tucked behind their lucidity. Some are full of humor. For example, Raab takes a strange fortune cookie line and turns it into a funny yet astute poem called “The Beautiful Afternoon of Chance”:
………………..Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.
Meanwhile, the collection’s darknesses and ironies are not poisonous, but smooth, essential, and inescapable. They ask, with every authentic human doubt, what lies behind the veil of the unknown; what it is that may emerge through the realization of our deepest fantasies, like
………………..….
………………..the splendor
………………..of an angel’s wings
………………..unfolding in the darkness,
………………..and someone like yourself
………………..waking into this vision, baffled
………………..at first, then overwhelmed
………………..by all that glorious and fearful light.
………………………………….-“God Considers His Losses”
Like an ancient storyteller, the speaker of April at the Ruins asks haunting questions that circle mortality. He furrows the waters over what is immediately apparent in order to see beyond the physical. Raab weaves expansive metaphors with classic natural imagery while maintaining frank language, so that through each ephemeral impression of daily life–its movements, contours, and fleeting choices–the reader is rewarded with wisdom and excruciatingly lovely, gentle intimacies. This excerpt is from the contemplative poem “False Dawn”:
………………..….
………………..The monks had been taught
………………..to welcome death.
………………..What was there to lose except
………………..The body and its troublesome
………………..Secrets and needs?
………………..They lit the candles because
………………..they always had,
………………..and because repetition
………………..is a comfort, the shape of a day
………………..falling into place
………………..as if it belonged to us.
Straightforwardly musing on elemental forces, Raab displays his range with clarity, generosity, and groundedness. This book is an excellent choice for both the newcomer to poetry and the longtime connoisseur. Its language is timeless; its shifting blue shallows and its night-colored depths are easy to treasure and return to.
………………..….
………………..What else couldn’t you see?
………………..a voice in your dream
………………..demands. Think about it.
………………..….
………………………………….Poem: “Perhaps”
These poems will ask something of you as they ask something of themselves. Raab weaves a golden spiral as personal themes close in on themselves with the book’s progression, so that April’s questions find their homes in gestures of memory and physicality. This is a collection to read at dawn with a cup of hot coffee.
An Interview with Lawrence Raab about April at the Ruins
Tiffany Troy: How does your first poem, “Lost,” set the reader up to read the collection that follows?
Lawrence Raab: “Lost” is one of the older poems in the book so it wasn’t written with the intention of being an introductory poem. As I moved the poems around, “Lost” seemed like a good poem to begin with. Why? Intuition, perhaps, the poem felt right.
Then it seemed useful to begin with a short poem. And it’s a “you” poem so even though the “you” isn’t necessarily the reader of this book, the reader might feel included. More significantly, the poem is about trying to find something that’s lost but also attempting to recover the past, and those concerns are present throughout the book: memory and loss, invention and restoration.
TT: Can you describe the process of writing April at the Ruins? Was the process similar or different from writing your previous collections?
LR: It’s similar to the extent that all of my collections have been gatherings of poems that were written over a period of 4 to 6 years. When I have enough poems, I start arranging them to see which ones might go together.
The book didn’t have an agenda or any kind of a shape that I was trying to follow. The poems come individually and then I try to find an organization that can contain and support them.
TT: That’s fascinating. For the different sections, did you sort of organize them by theme? How did you choose to organize the different poems into the five sections?
LR: What I most want to do in arranging a book is to allow every poem to present itself in the best way possible. If I have a poem that contains an important word used in the previous poem, or if I have two poems that end similarly, I probably don’t want them next to each other. For me, a lot of discoveries can be made in putting a book together, some rather distressing. An overreliance on certain words, for example, or similar kinds of situations or speakers. Then there are more complicated problems and opportunities. In April at the Ruins, there are quite a few dramatic monologues, several spoken by women. Did I want them together? Would they build, or would they seem repetitious?
At the end, I wish for groupings that will allow the poems to illuminate each other in terms of their voices and concerns.
So the second section, for example, contains a number of poems that share certain kinds of source materials. There are no poems in that section where the “I” is me. They’re all inventions, although some have sources in other fictions, like the Invisible Man.
TT: I love what you said about “concerns” instead of “meaning” or “theme.” How do you contain these concerns in different poetic forms? Do you choose the forms consciously or does it come naturally?
LR: Very little comes naturally, actually. The poems in the book aren’t specifically formal, though all poems have formal properties—the use of stanzas, for example. In a poem without any stanzas, the movement is continuously accumulative. Stanzas, whether they are regular or not, are ways to control the speed with which readers make their way through the poem, as well as emphasizing certain moments. A poem that ends with a single line makes a kind of dramatic gesture. A good friend of mine and a good reader of my poems has complained that I’m tempted to do that too often, and I think he’s right. It’s like a ta-da—reader, pay attention; this is important. Sometimes you earn that right, but a lot of the time, it can feel like an attempt to assert significance without building toward it properly.
I used to tell my students that when they’re stuck with a poem, they should change the way it looks. If it’s a block, move it to four line stanzas. If it’s in four line stanzas, move it to two line stanzas, or eight, then take it back to being a block. It’s useful to see how any visual configuration changes the poem.
TT: Earlier you spoke of dramatic monologues. You also tell stories, as in “After the Sky Has Fallen”, a reinvention of the fairy tale. How do fairy tales and fables help you create persona?
LR: I do love fairy tales. “After the Sky Has Fallen” borrows the basic story of children who are sent off into the dark woods, where they meet a witch and may or may not be saved. In this case, there’s a magical bird. Then they return home, or to a place that looks “like home.” The poem doesn’t want to provide too much certainty.
At the beginning, the fairy tale material is mixed in with the journey of the magi and the story of Chicken Little. I like interrelated and overlapping narratives.
But your question is how do the stories help me? They help get a poem started because they’re something to work with. I wouldn’t say I set out to reinvent a fairy tale, though I like the idea of reinvention and that may well come in. But you have to start somewhere, even if it’s not the place where the poem will eventually begin. Stories, storytelling, and stories within stories interest me.
In a dramatic monologue, tone is essential. Different attitudes come into play. There’s what a person is saying, and the poem’s attitude towards that person, and then what we are to believe. A fine example of the dramatic monologue is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” In this poem the speaker reveals himself without really meaning to. He gives himself away to a careful reader though perhaps not to his listener in the poem. And Browning is in control of it all.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?
LR: Invoking Wallace Stevens: A poem must give pleasure. Not teach or instruct, at least not at first. It’s a significant pleasure, for example, to look at a painting by Cezanne and think, That’s so beautiful I could sit here all day and not tire of it. I don’t ask: But what does this tree mean? When I listen to a wonderful piece of music, I’m taken by its loveliness, and by how well it works within its own terms, and by my discovery of what those terms are. So a sense of how the parts of a sonata or a painting fit together might be what follows pleasure, as well as what generates pleasure. How a poem handles its material and manages its voice are similar to the way Cezanne uses color and shape to move your eye from one part of the painting to another.
Beyond that, a poem may certainly lead to some kind of “revelation,” and that’s not a bad word, though it does have a lot of weight to it. I wouldn’t want to approach a poem expecting revelation. Poems, of course, tell us things. Words mean in a way sounds don’t—not a better way, just a different way. All I want to resist is reducing a poem to paraphrase. Better to ask, What does this poem do? Then raise the question of what it means. How a poem moves is as much a part of what it is about as a quotable statement. True revelations can be complicated.
I like poems that end by luring me back into reading them again. If a reader of a poem of mine felt excited about returning to re-experience it, rather than just figure it out, I would be happy. Figuring it out is what happens when you free yourself from trying to figure it out.
Lawrence Raab is the author of nine books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993) was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. Raab also wrote THE LIFE BESIDE THIS ONE (Tupelo 2017) and is the co-author (with Stephen Dunn) of the chapbook Winter at the Caspian Sea. In 2016, Tupelo published his collected essays, WHY DON’T WE SAY WHAT WE MEAN? Raab is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College, where he taught for forty-two years.
Marina Brown is a poet, editor, and translator. Born in Ukraine and raised in California, she holds two bachelor’s degrees in International Relations and Russian from UC Davis and an M.F.A. in Poetry from SDSU. She is an Editorial Assistant for Poetry International and a recipient of the Graduate Equity Fellowship, Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship, and Savvas Endowed Fellowship. She has had several book reviews published in both The Los Angeles Review and Poetry International.
Tiffany Troy is a critic, translator, and poet.
15 March 2023
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