Poetry

Stephen Ratcliffe is in his blue or green or yellow or mauve or brick-red or phthalocyanine period. That is, the serene repetitive seriousness of the shapes and colors of his work, like that of the late style of a great painter, who’s painting the same things, day after day, week after week, month after month, year by year (book by book) until what’s depicted, though absolutely precise and completely clear (located in space without exaggeration or attitude), modulates in color, picture by picture and day by day, until it disappears into its own blended shadings, becoming everything at once–and nothing. —Norman Fischer