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Blur

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By Doug Ramspeck

A kind of tension pervades these poems, balanced by an under-the-surface, learned tenderness. In Blur, place is one of the memorable characters. The poems actively slip into the mystery and rhythm of boy-ness, giving us the children’s roughhousing as much as the snow and riverbank. Time moves on to longing and dreams. “Decades became a bolt / on a door—sometimes latched, sometimes open.” Ramspeck is sonically skilled at opening a reader to “the austerity and the gentleness of holding still.”
—Lauren Camp, 2021 Tenth Gate Prize judge and author of Took House