Bin Ramke's Aerial (Omnidawn, 2012)

Some favourite passages:


Nocturnal warnings fill us with desire
to know the arts of birds
and the habits of fishes.

*

The land is the land, and home.
The water is the water, and home.
The light is the light is the air
and is its own home, we think.

*

What a contrite species this is
which does its damage by day and
by night regrets and dreams
or watches at windows.

from "Migrations of Birds and Fishes"

the beetle imago crawling two

dots on its back shiny as dew

under the murderous eye of sun

I of sunlight sizzling the morning as

if and we wait again against. For health.

end of "Living in Weather"

Everything is necessary, nothing

is sufficient. Speak to see

who listens.

second stanza of "Crystalline Structure,

Threat of Weather"

Boundaried vision and vapor conspire

to exhale, exalt into rain random dispersal into
the present. I see as far as that. I never saw farther.

from "Into Bad Weather Bounding"

   also silence might also be

white noise--all frequencies all intensities all

distance as an imagined reciprocal of absence

opening of "Contradiction, and the Enigmatic Modes"

The bird-bath encrusts itself, crystalline

graph, birds huddle and I watch from the window

the glazing of water.

from "To Breathe Together"

. . . ordinary,

this secretly separate sifting
of a self particulate, drifting

from "Desire. Consider. Star. Ice."

We begin. No, we don't. We hover over choices, claiming and

proclaiming one thing as beginning

then another.

from "Articulation"

. . . a shock it is to find you have a past 

not the one you remember. Forgone, forgotten.

end of "Beautiful Island:"

In the UK, Bin Ramke's Aerial is available from Foyle's, presently at a 22% discount.