cover image Someday Songs: Poems

Someday Songs: Poems

Rochelle Ratner. BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kans, $9.5 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-933532-89-2

Personal and religious encounters provide the raw material for Ratner's ( The Lion's Share ) 13th collection of poetry. And the poems, which evoke Jewish ritual and communal life, are remarkable for their simplicity, clarity and depth of feeling. They are not so much ``about'' religious experience as they are moments of it. In a poem dedicated to the illustrator Bernard Solomon--whose beautiful woodcuts support the text well--the poet responds to the Rebbe's (and Plato's) challenge to the artist: `` how dare you / pretend to create such life .''sic ital The reply: ``Tell the frightened child /you imitate it only.'' The poems are declared imitations, representations, and as such gain their power from their exactness of observation and from the poet's use of language as a mimetic tool. Not all of the poems are equally strong; some never transcend the coded autobiographical, occasional pieces for loved ones. But no matter. For the most part, Ratner's intelligence, perceptiveness, craft and humility before the material win out. She comments, ``somehow / when I'm quiet enough / the meanings surface.'' She's right. (Oct.)