Barbara Ras – författare

This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning. - C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, ""What's life without the details?""Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in ""You Can't Have It All:""But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fledWhether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone - how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother’s death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars—these facts, these consequences—bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book.Survival StrategiesTo dig for quahogs, to feel their edges like smilesand pull against their suck to toss them in a bucket.To feel the wind as a friend, to feel its current as luck.To ignore Capricorn and Cancer presuming to slice the globe.To know the lie in “names can never hurt you.”To be a gull breezing the blue, eating nothing but clouds.To measure your ties to the past by the strength of cobwebs.To haunt the widow’s walk, its twelve narrow windowseach the size of a child’s coffin.To watch the harbor where the Acushnet runs into Buzzards Baybefore it was named a Superfund site full of PCBs. To wonder if that water you swam summer after aimless summer could get you the way something got your brother, too fast, too soon.To bury or burn the whole family you were born toand talk to them only through the smoke of lettersyou torch at their graves. To see a snake with a ladybug on its backand still refuse to pray.

A third collection from a poet whose "beautiful sentences weave the miraculous and mundane into a single, luminous tapestry" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Barbara has won acclaim for fluid and graceful poems that touch on the small occurrences and mysteries of daily life in the hopes of finding the secret meaning beneath them. Both intimate and wide ranging, her work is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, and sometimes comedic. Her third collection, The Last Skin, extends and develops these qualities, offering landscapes and characters both domestic and exotic, in poignant personal lyrics of precise description that investigate beauty, grief, death, fragility, time, and loss. Here is a poet engaged with the spirit as well as the political, blending the give and take of the world into her own ecstatic rhythms.

Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras''s poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what''s cherished to what''s lost, from culture to nature.

Poetry and painting have enjoyed a long life together, with artists like Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell using poetry in their works and poets like John Ashbery and Ron Padgett working closely with visual artists. The tradition of artists and poets collaborating continues in You Can’t Have It All.This elegant and intimate book presents Ras’s poem “You Can’t Have It All,” which has enjoyed a long life of appreciation by many fans worldwide. Enthusiastic readers, writers, workshop leaders, Buddhist practitioners, and poetry therapists have used the poem to mark occasions, teach classes, and inspire students.Paintings by Terrell James elevate the lines of the poem to a new level of resonance. She often turns to poetry for inspiration in her studio. For James, a poem reflects the knowledge from the entire life of the poet, and she often uses lines from poems as titles for artworks.Given the wide appeal and the insightful depth of the work by both of these artists, it’s no wonder they found one another for this radiant collaboration.