Do You Know this Type of Tree
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96 pages, $14 cover price
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Andrew Ruzkowski lives and writes in Chicago. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Limestone, [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, The Seattle Review, Permafrost, Arsenic Lobster, Switchback, and Third Coast, among others. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, a Best of the Net award, and was a finalist for the 2012 Atlantis Award and the 2012 Kay Murphy Prize for Poetry. His debut chapbook, A Shape & Sound, is available from ELJ Publications. He also serves as the reviews editor for Poets’ Quarterly, and as a poetry editor for Black Tongue Review.
This debut collection of poems by Andrew Ruzkowski is extraordinary work. It has the feeling of having emerged as a practice, as a way of being in the world. And so the epigraph from Larry Eigner—“. . . a poem can be assay(s) of things come upon, can be a stretch of thinking”—is no mere ornament but rather a disclosure of deep kinship, a kind of dialogue, between these two poets. Ruzkowski is part of a life-line of poets who actually see things and who actually listen. This book is unusually supple and rich with, by turns, discursive freedom and lyric integrity (“the sound sitting there feral in deep persistence”). At once intuitive and intellectually probing, the poems are in the world and the world is the stuff of the poems. With regard to the whole gigantic life of poetry, Ruzkowski points to what’s possible, which is nothing less than what is necessary. “Let’s compound this thing so large,” he says, and does. Yes, let’s. —Lisa Fishman
ROCK
For the world we keep
here in this field
A myth being
abandoned there
A being being here
I do mind the space
& creation more than composition
Look at a quiet puncture in the dark telling
of a street in a city crossing
I looked at it & turned to see the source
Resisted a fragile scheme
A globe turning full
We focus this primacy on broken dirt
the sound sitting there feral in deep persistence
There are many surfaces
There must be facets &/or some connection
whether small or smaller balancing a space
A post meaning sign/word drifting
let us in
let us into your house
Let’s compound this thing so large
it is sky come round or just a door perhaps knocking closed
The number of windows in this space is multitudinous
read pane stacking on pane
Their surface uneven or bowing or
I am caught in the face of objects
HONEY LOCUST
On the walk we talk incessantly of fruiting bodies
& tree sexes or the lack thereof
For instance
Salix babylonica
Weeping Willow
Must have or be near a source of water
Often seen along rivers creeks lakes & ponds
Have you seen this tree
Of course you have
Origin China
Not Babylon
Come into the world
& the sun is there
& the sun is there
& rays upon us
The flowers are arranged in catkins produced early in the spring
it is dioecious
Again male & female exist on separate trees
Let’s keep walking
The mausoleums are massive in concrete & marble
The global economy of fisticuffs
a chorus split some personality
Out the window to look at a wheel turning
each spoke catching light in a way woven
a discordance flying vocal chords a definite feeling
The habit of dreams
What do you remember about how you got here
What is your name
Do you know this type of tree
Yes Catalpa
I like their white flowers
temporary & grow
just so around here Wide flat leaves Bean pods
make the Catalpa quite easily identifiable
Thrall to the Midwestern United States Native
Ornamental
in ranges & directions & what we see
APIARY
Wind has
at last
put me to bed
Please say
yes the body
A wheel along
the river in the road
Where did you come from
How did you arrive
Anticipating the moment
the axe falls
splitting
a rigid object almost
some lumber piled dizzily
collapsing
Calendula for the face & body
A Chinese purple
picture on the wall
So many songs & beasts through
the cracked door cracking
A telescoping cloud inches
from my eye
cumulus cirrus stratus nimbus
& the rain has come pelting
& is known