Balefire: Poems by Shann Ray

Balefire: Poems Reviews

• 
  Mark

  Excellent poetry, full of color, warmth, and depth. Ray continues to work material of the same austere beauty as his short story collection, American Masculine. Stories of domestic life, both good and very bad, take place against a backdrop of the Montana landscape,
  
  "where they stand and look out, down a draw,
  of scrub pine and mottled veins of sage,
  blown timothy grass bent to the ground
  and everything converging
  along the silver-blue of the big river, 
  the sweep of the valley,
  the four directions, the compass rose,
  
  and far off a land mass: the broad back
  of a giant sleeper."
  
  I particularly enjoyed the alternation between poems with long, luxurious lines, and briefer, almost aphoristic lines. One can extract from poems a line here or there, and set those brief lines in a frame to be enjoyed. Here's two: 
  
  on the lips of a lover/rough honey.
  
  as the autumn trees/carrying dusk in their arms.
  
  Were Shann Ray's poems to survive in fragments, like a latter-day Sappho, a few lines like these quickly convey his sensitivity, sense of language, and vision. Highly recommended!