But Not Yet

Ralph Burns has a steady hand and a sharp eye and ear, which are essential for the way his poems can careen through unexpected territories and neighborhoods, turning corners, often, on two wheels. You learn to trust him and to revel in the skill with which he steers you through each poem, always finding the right word, and making, again and again, just the right move.

Such earthly gifts touch this book—the poet Virgil, turtles and snakes, speeding tickets for outrunning funerals, cypress trees, visits to hell with a 'father in his Hawaiian shirt.' So Ralph Burns meditates and dreams and works through pleasure and grief right now and past snow globes and marriage and oilfields, childhood kitchens “lit against chaos,” the “square root” of the aged who gather in a nursing home to watch Wheel of Fortune. But the fortune is ours, these poems which never presume or falsify, this book we open to find those like us who “crawled/ over stars and water in search of heaven/, a safety pin, a riser, a river, a wave.”