Poems by Barbara Ras, Stephen Burt Focus on Nature

In Barbara Ras' "Our Flowers" we found, amid striking imagery of storms, electricity and clouds, once again, the story of a relationship, probably a couple in their middle years, one that has gone through some failure (like the Internet instructions) but seems to have survived. We noted the obvious differences (his interest in substations, hers in clouds). Dreaming our own painful music, we await the next storm.

Stephen Burt begins his poem's metaphor in the first line--"Low dandelion leaves are zoned commercial--and sustains it throughout. We seem to be talking about "the natural disaster of humanity," surely an ecological statement and perhaps political as well. But we did not resolve the significance of the two lines in Italics at the poem's heart. The idea of "another world" appears frequently, sometimes in a religious context, once by Yeats (I could not run down the reference to Elizabeth Bishop)--but none of that helps us. The enigmatic quality of that couplet is what takes this poem into new and intriguing ground.

I believe we will find George Bilgere entertaining but not without very serious content.