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About A
Small Song Called Ash From the Fire
“What
rises in flames falls / As ash, and what never burns
/ Turns the heart to stone....” While lyricism ultimately
may not be transcendent here, stoicism is a more grievous
fate. And it’s the contention between what rises in
flames and what turns to stone that so powerfully drives
these poems. It’s our great good fortune that the daunting
places and undaunted presences possessing this poet
so vividly inhabit his poetry – from Cobb’s Lake to
the anonymous hand that scrawled on a Memphis wall “I
done broke / life & death / down.” I like this work,
I’ve liked it since the first time I saw it, I’m going
to enjoy and admire it for years to come. "
–
William Pitt Root, author of Faultdancing
and Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom
"Musical,
keenly seen and given…powerful poems of family life,
loss and violence…Price’s gift for language, his affinity
for the natural world of hawk, river, oak, coupled with
his story telling skills, mark him as a poet of vision
and grace clearly deserving our praise."
– Colette Inez, author of Clemency and
Getting Under Way
"From
the beautiful and subtle internal rhymes of “First Story”
to the startling spareness of “Versions of My Father’s
Disappearance into a Hawk,” in the ribald language of
“Brother Songs,” Ron Price has created in poem after
magnificent poem a grand song, at once mosaic and splintered
solitude, of an America bloody-born in the Mississippi
delta...What a splendid fire, this book of poems."
–
Indran Amirthanayagam, author of The Elephants
of Reckoning
Fae
Myenne Ng, author of Bone, described A Crucible
for the Left Hand, as “powerful, richly textured poems
that capture the brutality of fear and a man’s fierce
surrendering to love... Like the songs of redemption,
these poems are gifts of hope. They nourish.”
"Uttering
lines both undulant and endstopped, Ron Price speaks
often and tellingly of silence: the crashing silence
of a household whose open secrets are plain but unexplained:
alcoholism, intermittent violence, the seemingly accidental
killing of one brother by another. “And I know now the
time of the Fathers is a dream / That vanishes, and
limitless are the themes of its vanishing.” Price writes
in a requiem for his father. “What is lost can’t be
regained, though the loss be redeemed.” This debut collection
marks the welcome emergence of a poetic voice both hopeful
and mature."
–
Rika Lesser, author of Growing Back and
All We Need of Hell
And
in a review of Surviving Brothers, Alexandria
Fortunato wrote, “Price is a poet drawn to the moment
after things break down, when a man bends his knee and
begins to pick up the broken pieces. There is a rhythmic
feel,” she continued, “that seems to arise as much out
of the earth as out of the poet’s acute sense of place,”
what the Painted Bride Quarterly described
as “intense moments in the midst of the continuing earth.”
European
writer and editor Joris Duytschaever wrote, “Reading
A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire is a gripping
experience. Price shows affinities with Rilke and the
masters of empathy.”
Peter
M. Rojcewicz, author of The Boundaries of Orthodoxy,
characterized the poems in A Small Song Called Ash
From The Fire as “Eruptions - theft, drunkenness,
violence
become crucibles of the sublime, dark matter bodied
into the holy. Price’s sense of the sacred, immanent
in the wreckage of our lives, appears unannounced as
desire, the longing for wholeness, vulnerable and embattled.”
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Memphis
native's poetry draws on experiences of the South
By
Paul McDonald Special to The
Commercial Appeal
Memphis native Ron Price's first full-length book of
poems, A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire, is a fiercely
honest work drawn from his experience of living in the
South. Far from being a collection of boring homilies
about how great it is to live in the country, Price
composes a genuine portrait of time and place. Price,
the poet-in-residence at the Juilliard School in New
York, understands that in rural America a restless undercurrent
of energy expresses itself in twisted driftwood, boisterous
revival meetings and the dynamics of extended families
living under the same roof for generations.
In Sitting On An Eastern Bluff Along the Mississippi
River, Price briefly alludes to the subtlety of this
unseen power:
Whatever
navigates this river
Learns of patience composed with a breath
Odd as sunlight
Losing itself in loam, or the black moon
Tangled in tree limbs and stone
Surviving
Brothers is a memory of the poet's aunt telling
his father of two brothers fighting and one being accidentally
killed - a memory triggered while lying in a field observing
a caterpillar crawl up a stalk, implying a unifying
yet conflicting force just beneath the surface of the
countryside's beauty.
In
A Desecrated Field of Grace, Price meets the
force head on, moving into the vortex with images of
anger and violence passed from one generation to the
next:
The
field behind my father's house,
Fallow now.
Brown stubble.
A few cornstalks still almost stand
Hacked off above the dry dirt
The roots have since rotted back into ...
The last time I held my father in my arms
We were fighting,
I pulled his shirt over his head, whirled him around
And fled the house, the desecrated field.
Grounding
the spirit of the book is an actual place Price refers
to frequently. Cobbs Lake is a place "... where
diamondback snakes and fish glide/Silent through algae
and frog spit ... " In the poem of the same name, Price's
imagery is so vivid you could swear you hear tree frogs
and smell honeysuckle. Price recalls his first cigarette,
watching a couple having sex in a car and old man Cobb
himself, the man who never actually owned the lake,
but fenced it in and posted "No Trespassing" signs.
In calling back these memories and events, there are
feelings of decay and loss for all the life that happened
in a place where "sand is redeemed with silt" and will
pass away with a legacy never acknowledged.
Price
skillfully utilizes found poetry, or moments stripped
bare that would go unnoticed had the poet not been there
to record them. At one point Price uses the graffiti
on a bathroom wall in a Memphis theater ("I done broke
life & death down"). When an older woman gives advice
to her daughter-in-law ("Meanness is the only thing
that keeps me alive") it sounds genuine enough to make
you wonder if it's found or created.
The
found poetry and restless energy converge in the book's
third part, "Pilgrim's Rest," a powerful section with
testimonies from church members on the passing of their
pastor, Reverend Taylor. The invisible presence felt
throughout the book now manifests and thunders in the
testimony and notes for a sermon by Reverend Peterson:
One
night, some white men came into the Church with guns.
You niggers don't need no education. All ya'll need
to know is how to write your name where you're told.
Then they left.
Reverend
Taylor looked out at all those scared children who didn't
understand. Hear all things, he told us, and hold to
that which is good. The truth is good because the truth
will set you free.
A
Small Song Called Ash From the Fire is rich with
life, death and redemption.
Paul
McDonald is a poet and freelance writer in Louisville,
Ky. September
23, 2001
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