Even Blood

Ralph Angel (1951–2020) was the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, where he shaped the Creative Writing Department and taught for 39 years, and a member of the MFA in Writing Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His last collection of poems, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song. His later work included entropia, a collection of thirty-one fine art images, and Strays, a limited-edition chapbook of poems.

“Sacredness, strangeness. Revelation, reverence. Attentiveness, exigence. If we listen carefully, Ralph Angel reveals here how to undertake and interpret the singular journeys of his own unique, masterful poems. The mysteries within the quotidian; the slippery, oblique correspondences between solitary, seemingly unlike things; the fervent belief in poems as acts of irreducible consciousness and enactments of intimacy. As he lived, still lives, in the moment of his poems, so too does he lucidly inhabit these unassuming, often brilliant musings on his art. It is such a pleasure to hear his unmistakable voice again so clearly.”—Mark Cox, author of Knowing: Poems“The most enduring poetry teaches us how to listen to a new and higher music, and that’s precisely what Ralph Angel’s posthumous work Even Blood does, along with his previous collections. Each poem becomes a kapparah, and within its atonement for our lives, perception shifts between the eternal and the dissolving present: ‘Even in a thousand years time / I sit for a while / in a garden / among tall buildings / and put my mind / beneath the sound of / water / falling / and eat a fabulous / tomato…’ By telescoping time he enlarges sensation. To read his poetry is to be cleansed, transformed into something higher. ‘We were holy places there. / And we would keep / repeating that.’  Thank you, Mister Angel, for the beautiful ride.”—Mark Irwin, author of Once When Green “In Ralph Angel's poems, one senses that one is sitting before an almost finished painting of which he is the hapless, skeptical narrator, simultaneously distracted by and attuned to just one tiny red dot (blood?) of hopelessness drifting off somewhere there in the corner. How did we, too, find ourselves in this mirrored, Velásquez-angled infinitude, and with this somehow trusted yet unreliable narrator who has found access to our very souls, however tenuous, however steadfast? In almost every poem, you can hear Ralph Angel responding, "I don't know, you tell me."—Gillian Conoley, author of Notes from the Passenger