Black Flowers - by Doug Ramspeck (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In dark, lyrical verse, Black Flowers follows a speaker from childhood into adulthood, as he navigates the animistic world of crows, conjurings, and winter snows. Doug Ramspeck guides readers through the brutality and beauty found in the natural world: the moonlight, "marrow-white, severed, falling bodily / to grass, the hours as permeable as clay" and "dust lifting across the road / as though to form a human shape." By juxtaposing euphony and clear, startling imagery, Ramspeck's novelistic new collection molds the landscape to reflect the speaker's memories and the challenges of growing up in a dysfunctional family. In the tradition of William Wordsworth, Black Flowers brings the flourishes of the Romantics to the grit of the present day.

Review Quotes

A brooding spirit awakens the reader of Black Flowers into moments of residual brutality or loss skirted with primitive beauty--snow falling on a butchered horse, a drowned boy skipping stones. It is with equal parts care and abandon that Ramspeck figures a landscape inscribed in and by our being. He paints the field of a lengthening life with exquisite economy, in dusk and mud and snow, the sentiments illuminating that field both loving and feral.--Paula Closson Buck, author of You Cannot Shoot a Poem

In his powerful new book of poems, Black Flowers, Doug Ramspeck forges a ghostic language of the natural order, less to domesticate the animal than to animate the human, to explore, via imaginative seeing, our instinctual birthright of grief, love, and 'commotion / of need.' Such is the gift here, the power of communion with the unknown, however wounding, wounded, or aloof, the cut grass 'not an antidote to death / but its companion.' A deeply beautiful book.--Bruce Bond, author of Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015

About the Author

Doug Ramspeck is associate professor of English at The Ohio State University at Lima and the author of six collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. His prize-winning work has been published in a range of journals, including The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, storySouth, and The American Literary Review.