Billy Ramsell is a poet of light and silences. That light might as often be a ‘laptop’s glow’, the ‘lilac machine light’ of a hospital respirator, or the flickering of a Point of Sale device as it is the natural ‘buttery sunlight of late morning’. And those silences might—as in the prose poem, ‘The Silence Bar’—be tainted by ‘faint hints of air-conditioning and other machine noise’; they might have become purchasable commodities that can only be defined in terms of techno music at a festival suddenly ceding to ‘the faint strains of lake-water lapping’ or of a stadium’s hush as a penalty kick is taken. But Ramsell is no less a latter-day Romantic for that. His finger is on the technological pulse, but his poems long for simplicity and self-erasure—‘the dream of winter’ that continually threatens the formal architecture of this, his second, collection.
Dedalus Press 2013
Translated into: Italian
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