Sound of Wave in Channel (Book 1)

Here's a new music of greatest subtlety where the poems' musicality is not due only to their sounds but to their structure. The use of repetitions with minute variations goes beyond its equivalence in contemporary american music, and achieves the hypnotic power that we find only in the best renditions of, for example, classical persian melodies. Steve Ratcliffe has taken his poetic researches into highest territory by instinctively managing to assemble his modules--or short verses, in ways strategically controlled and still seamlessly and hauntingly beautiful. His mythical ridge has become the earth's curvature, as well as a space platform, where energies shift, turn and return, to create a 'mega-poem' of cosmic intention.--Etel Adnan

Stephen Ratcliffe is an ethnologist of the present. SOUND OF WAVE IN CHANNEL, his extended aubade for Bolinas, shows us the difference in what stays the same in the incremental changes of weather, water, light, and sound. It is a book in which nothing happens, yet everything is in motion--'everywhere a point of // difference.' In these nine-line poems written daily over a period of years, he fuses his mobile sensoria with the natural world: light coming into sky, sound of wave in channel--the primordial phenomena of life at the littoral. And in the perception of events unfolding in this landscape and soundscape there is also a subtext that asserts the value of the present instance in a world devoted to the pursuit of deferred happiness. Ratcliffe's patient act of watching restores us to what is most familiar, and in so doing discovers that 'somewhere called 'HERE I AM.'--Michael Davidson

Planet, sky, light. The plane of a ridge shadowed or still black. The channel and the sound of wave in channel. Attending day after day to perceptions of things of the world that flicker and move on--a 'golden-crowned sparrow's oh dear, ' a 'jet passing above the pine branch'--Ratcliffe's poem holds space for the non-human, reveals consciousness to be sparks thrown off by arcs of sound and sight. Between the channel and sun rising over the ridge nothing and everything is present. A meditation that returns us to the world, to breath and to word, such staying-with affords a much-needed practice--resistance in our time of egotistical ravaging of the Earth.--Karla Kelsey