Free Verse Editions Series Editor: Jon Thompson The poems of THE
FOREVER NOTES are canny and lyrical and never a word too long. Many
are song-like, repeating the things that are most important to them
over and over to make them stay: "You and the trees/ Trees and the
night around you." Others tell small stories, utterly clear line by
line but elusive, almost elegiac, in their slides of feeling and
shifts of thought. They feel like a life you must have lived but
can't quite remember, like a dream you try to tell even as it fades
behind you. Ethel Rackin's wistful and whimsical "Notes" and
"Pictures" and "Songs" are brief glances and glancing blows, each
so understated and tantalizing that it seems to call for another
and another, until without quite realizing it you've read the book
straight through. -JAMES RICHARDSON Plato wrote in the Timaeus of
time as the moving image of eternity. In Ethel Rackin's THE FOREVER
NOTES each of these terms finds resonance: the fleeting objects of
the world are moving, and persons moved; her lyric syntax builds
pictures that dissolve into song and then turn back to image again;
the eternal endures in its endless transformations. "Leaves are for
changing" she observes-an insight just as true of the leaves of her
book. -SUSAN STEWART Ethel Rackin's lyrical sound bites have a
mysterious hold. In them, the visual and the aural are inextricably
linked. "Adrift in internal music," is how she puts it. Her notes
are notations that produce pictures of the real world, but those
notes also create songs. "Each object has a title," says Rackin;
her poems demonstrate that each object has musical depth, too. The
result is beautiful: "A song that reaches as far as an eye can
see." -DAVID TRINIDAD Everyone should read this book because it is
so effective and unique. The book will make you ache, whether or
not you're an artist. It will intrigue you. Its objects-trees,
chocolate, wheelbarrows, a ship on the sea, nightgowns, rug
samples, a garden, a femur bone, cookies, a blind bird, curbs,
scotch - have a relationship with the speaker and with us that is
personal, moving, isolated, lonely, and longing. In a shattered
world we recognize as very close to ours and also see as an exotic
destination, there is a song overall as if we were hearing it in a
woods, or on the ocean, or in a city, hearing it from somewhere and
compelled to find it. It's this new, essential poet. -ARTHUR
VOGELSANG ETHEL RACKIN was born in Philadelphia. Her work has
appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Court
Green, Evergreen Review, Poetry East, Volt, and elsewhere. She
earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature
from Princeton University. She has taught at Penn State Brandywine,
Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in
Pennsylvania, where she is currently an assistant professor.
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