Twice Removed

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between, " that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person. Ralph Angel's poems see, and then reveal, Joycean "layers of history" -- the past showing through the present, a host of bustling echoes set in motion by the vanished lives of others, and by the poet's own previous selves. "Among the very dawn of us, " Angel sings, "a single shrug of heart unleashes waves of / birds and voices from the plaza." Angel's poems are haunted by a sort of collective esprit de l'escalier -- an anguish that things we left undone and unsaid go on resonating: "A bride and groom stand shivering on a tarmac / in the mist, and / they are happy. Each one // and all of us entangled." Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers.