The Mouth Of The Bay by Michael Ruby

In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost’s famous dictum about poetry. The Mouth of the Bay begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily—“There is no beginning and there is no end”—and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others. In “Elements,” he breaks the coastal landscape into six elements—rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun—and writes a stanza for each, creating a series of 23 poems akin to abstract expressionist landscapes. In the long poem, “Wave Talk,” he listens to small waves lapping against the rocks and writes the conversational phrases that appear in his mind. In the last section, “Foghorns,” he responds to the blue sky and water of Frenchman Bay on clear days and the two-note foghorn at Egg Rock Light on foggy days. The poems end with delight in the sights and sounds around us, the words that appear within us.

Michael Handler Ruby is the author of five other full-length poetry collections: At an Intersection (Alef Books, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX [books], 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010) and American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013); and a trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill Press, 2012), which includes two ebooks, Fleeting Memories (UDP, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). He is also the author of two other poetry ebooks, Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018), and four Dusie Kollektiv chapbooks, including The Star-Spangled Banner (2011). He is the co-editor of Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015). A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 146 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-306-5

$16

The Mouth of the Bay by Mic… by BlazeVOX [books]