Black Flowers

In his powerful new book of poems, Black Flowers, Doug Ramspeck forges a ghostic language of the natural order, less to domesticate the animal than to animate the human, to explore, via imaginative seeing, our instinctual birthright of grief, love, and ‘commotion / of need.’ Such is the gift here, the power of communion with the unknown, however wounding, wounded, or aloof, the cut grass ‘not an antidote to death / but its companion.’ A deeply beautiful book. ~Bruce Bond, author of Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015

A brooding spirit awakens the reader of Black Flowers into moments of residual brutality or loss skirted with primitive beauty—snow falling on a butchered horse, a drowned boy skipping stones. It is with equal parts care and abandon that Ramspeck figures a landscape inscribed in and by our being. He paints the field of a lengthening life with exquisite economy, in dusk and mud and snow, the sentiments illuminating that field both loving and feral. ~Paula Closson Buck, author of You Cannot Shoot a Poem