Bite every sorrow : poems / Barbara Ras

"Winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 1997"--P. v.

Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious."