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Basil
"In Basil, Katharine Rauk offers up a flurry of searing images that is precise, worldly, near-angelic, and wholly sensuous. Out of the "unmanned / mansion of her mind" emerges a lucid stream of poems that this reader finds wonderfully idiomatic and sure-footed in tone and vision. There is a unique power to her imagination that movingly explores love, intimacy, and the natural world with linguistic flair and liveliness. I cannot imagine a more propitious addition and greater proof to our belief in what makes poetry essential to our lives than this book you now hold in your hands."
—Major Jackson
—Major Jackson
- GenresPoetry
32 pages, Paperback
First published August 23, 2011
5 people want to read
About the author
Katharine Rauk
3 booksKatharine Rauk has published poems in Pleiades, Harvard Review, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, Best of the Net 2012, and elsewhere. She reviews books for SCOUT and teaches at North Hennepin Community College.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 9, 2018
These are fine poems that make playful use of language. I particularly liked "An Assembly of Lit Things," a flight of fancy about a woman who collects lightbulbs. I'm glad I came across this one, and I'll look for more by this poet.
December 15, 2017
You can't judge a book by its cover because if you could I would've enjoyed this one very much. Vern C. Gorst's black and white photograph of four women at the beach gives off an enticingly retro vibe while book designer Steven Seighman's use of a little yellow dot to hold the word "poems" feels both like a discount sticker and the sun. It's an impeccable cover. But inside... Well, I did like the noted inspirations: Pablo Neruda, Joseph Cornell, Frida Kahlo... So maybe this book was intended to pull me in only to propel me out.
August 23, 2011
Fascinating World of Katherine Rauk
Katherine Rauk is a poet who is able to create poems that not only are rich in verbal visuals but also take the reader to places that demand a large step up in imagination to appreciate her casually dropped quantums of expression. It is easy to get lost in a Rauk poem, but in many ways that seems to be one of her concepts - take the reader as far as safe footing then leap forward with sculpted ideas and word images that make returning to the beginning of the poem thought imperative. She understands eroticism and uses it in unexpected ways. At times her use of words is so fresh, so new, that a time-out is required just to savour them. She knows how to microscopically explore the inner regions of the human body (at times as seen by a spider, at times expressed as a scout) and with every poem she opens a window to new places we have never visited - or if we have, it has been without the technicolor vision of Hauk.
WRECKED: White pillows tosses/ like so much foam,/ a headboard thrashed/ into cedar shards -/ each one etched by the squiggled hallways/ beetles eat into wood/ like the twists of a difficult sonata/ or the channels inside a woman's body / where even music gets lost -/ fish scales littering the sand/ to assemble a ruin/ of stained glass.
THE ANT; "It might be a bullet ant," Jack reported at dinner. "The
sting of the bullet ant rates the highest of any ant species on
the Schmidt Pain Index." Jack was well-informed about such
subjects. Maude admired the glossiness of the ant's head, the
way he shivered the serrated spurs that graced the end of each
one of his six legs when she tenderly stroked his scape. She
imagined unsnapping his polished carapace, swinging open his
two sides to fine interlocking chambers intricate as clockwork,
each one ticking like a newborn violin. The room took on the
luster of well-worn wooden spoons. The hour of clouds had
begun. Outside the window, a telephone line stretched across
the backyard, a single uncut string.
Or Rauk can take a simpler approach to our emotions as in the following:
SHE WAS BORN IN A CEDAR BOX
and is kept there
inside the smell of lakeshore, the one
which begins in April, the one
where her parents walked
together but now no longer walk, where
the grass speaks names
and no one waits
and someone squeezes an accordion
which brims the air with oranges
and breathes out gusts of black roosters
and builds stairwells of up and down and even
sideways, for the sound underneath is the sound
of wind sawing the trees
and sanded planks set in place
and a cedar box snapped shut so its sweet scents
open in the darkness in which
days do not begin
but are always beginning to end.
There just aren't many wordsmiths to match her, and once infected there s little hope (or desire) for cure!
Grady Harp
Katherine Rauk is a poet who is able to create poems that not only are rich in verbal visuals but also take the reader to places that demand a large step up in imagination to appreciate her casually dropped quantums of expression. It is easy to get lost in a Rauk poem, but in many ways that seems to be one of her concepts - take the reader as far as safe footing then leap forward with sculpted ideas and word images that make returning to the beginning of the poem thought imperative. She understands eroticism and uses it in unexpected ways. At times her use of words is so fresh, so new, that a time-out is required just to savour them. She knows how to microscopically explore the inner regions of the human body (at times as seen by a spider, at times expressed as a scout) and with every poem she opens a window to new places we have never visited - or if we have, it has been without the technicolor vision of Hauk.
WRECKED: White pillows tosses/ like so much foam,/ a headboard thrashed/ into cedar shards -/ each one etched by the squiggled hallways/ beetles eat into wood/ like the twists of a difficult sonata/ or the channels inside a woman's body / where even music gets lost -/ fish scales littering the sand/ to assemble a ruin/ of stained glass.
THE ANT; "It might be a bullet ant," Jack reported at dinner. "The
sting of the bullet ant rates the highest of any ant species on
the Schmidt Pain Index." Jack was well-informed about such
subjects. Maude admired the glossiness of the ant's head, the
way he shivered the serrated spurs that graced the end of each
one of his six legs when she tenderly stroked his scape. She
imagined unsnapping his polished carapace, swinging open his
two sides to fine interlocking chambers intricate as clockwork,
each one ticking like a newborn violin. The room took on the
luster of well-worn wooden spoons. The hour of clouds had
begun. Outside the window, a telephone line stretched across
the backyard, a single uncut string.
Or Rauk can take a simpler approach to our emotions as in the following:
SHE WAS BORN IN A CEDAR BOX
and is kept there
inside the smell of lakeshore, the one
which begins in April, the one
where her parents walked
together but now no longer walk, where
the grass speaks names
and no one waits
and someone squeezes an accordion
which brims the air with oranges
and breathes out gusts of black roosters
and builds stairwells of up and down and even
sideways, for the sound underneath is the sound
of wind sawing the trees
and sanded planks set in place
and a cedar box snapped shut so its sweet scents
open in the darkness in which
days do not begin
but are always beginning to end.
There just aren't many wordsmiths to match her, and once infected there s little hope (or desire) for cure!
Grady Harp
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews