Ralph La Charity

Blood Vertigo Ralph La Charity

Poetry. BLOOD VERTIGO, as words yoked, is a construct that carries a lot of connotative weight, the way those two extraordinary words work when bound together. With BLOOD VERTIGO, the oral nature of the poetry is not so foregrounded...what BLOOD VERTIGO's movement insists upon is what is both internal and hair-raising about the workings of poetry thru Time. This is a book that takes Time. This book insists upon Time being both now AND then, the way the blood of the poet records what is happening as a function of Time being experienced as a disorienting enjambment wherein composition is somewhat at the mercy of multiple coterminous consciousness streams. Most of the poetry herein is current to the last couple of years, while some of it hearkens decades back, to earlier eras of the poet's compositional practice, and the resulting contrast is both utile and harrowing. The poet is awake within that disruption, is awake TO that disruption, and will use such disruption as a palpable cumulative influence on both the flow of the book's contents AND on the line-by-line making of each individual poem...which is why there is so much variation to both the themes and methods the poems in this book employ. The challenge with regard to the book's design aspects has to do with finding a visual way to address that Mystery which is at the book's core, the book's Essence in fact: Time itself is the specific charismatic turbulence that the poet's Muse submerges his poet's Need to compose within... Honor that bloody, vertiginous Mystery, o Poet.