From the Contemporary Poetry Series #1
Tom Raworth
Praise for Meadow
These fourteen poems, ranging from “Intellectual Compost Four” (beginning is a minor danger) to “No Music” (bones lie across the country/covered in rare mixed leaves/unable to keep them//to choose the surest gain), are spare, delicate, unerringly thoughtful. Tom Raworth, word comet streaking across the night sky of our market-driveling-cruel-funny culture: This book illuminates with its own black light—”moving explosion… shadows of pure colour… blank cartoons nerves of speed/ dissolving scars…” Its improbably delicate beauty, a non-righteous moving critique of our terror, awakens the mind’s senses in this briefly visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. As always, Raworth’s poetry is full of humor and rage and love and utmost vocal precision.
— Joan Retallack
It is poetry not just of celerity—which we think of in terms of wit—but also of speed. Despite an inclination to stop and sort out connections, the poems in Meadow have a forward momentum with little space for pause.
— Devin Johnston, Chicago Review