A well-curated gallery

Review of Who’s Asking?: Poems, Keith Ratzlaff (Anhinga Press, 2020)

I typically shun the audio guides when visiting an art museum, preferring instead to plunge in and let the place wash over me. I don’t like being told what to look at – much less what it means. Happily, during a visit some years ago to the Zentrum Paul Klee, in Bern, Switzerland, my wife insisted I borrow her earpiece. While I can no longer recall the painting, I vividly remember the audio. It featured two scholars whose authoritative takes were wildly different, with one seeing the joys of childhood, and the other the horrors of war. I loved it, but I still don’t trust audio guides.

I feel as though Keith Ratzlaff is someone who would appreciate that, and not just because Klee’s work has been a significant inspiration for him, both in a previous collection and in this, his seventh. He’s not one to tell you how to feel about things, and that tone is set in the first three lines of “Creation Story,” the opening poem: “In one version…” / “In another…” / “In another….” But not to worry. There’s certainty, too, in this moving and, at times, unsettling, work – we’re mortal, and the clock is ticking. A few lines later, we read that:

…she feels like a woman she saw one day, stooping and tying her shoes on an escalator.

Absorbed like that but on deadline. (3)

The sense of time marching on will stay with you as you explore these 32 deeply honest and satisfying poems. They carry the reader not only through space and time, but also into the realm of angels, as well as the “pipes and vaults” of our hearts. From the moment I stepped into the opening section, I knew I’d entered a well-curated gallery, one that left me sighing with satisfaction at encountering the rich tone and texture of the lines, while also delivering plenty of opportunities to pause and ponder my own responses to the many open-ended questions on display.

Ratzlaff (now professor emeritus at Central College, where he began teaching in 1984) was likely wrapping up this manuscript at about the same time he was looking over retirement paperwork. That’s a time of life when one may be attending to elderly parents, not to mention gaining unwelcome insights into the frailty of one’s own body. He captures these life transitions elegantly and powerfully in poems like “Over,” where we first encounter the image of the body as a pavilion.

Shu Shi called his pavilion

the tower of the golden rain

to commemorate a storm

that saved the crops.

This is not that year….

Call it her last day, lungs

filling like the pavilion’s ewers. (5)

Pavilions are built for summer and can be fine in the spring and fall. But winter is coming, and where does that leave the heart? In Ratzlaff’s case, happily, the heart is strong, and it has plenty of questions. Section One concludes with “What I Asked,” in which there is a moment when all present, down to a dog and its fleas, are stunned by the beauty of the setting sun. They all “… look up as if / it were a call to prayer. / Which it was …” And the prayer flows forth as a series of questions, including: “Why are your answers / always in the form / of questions?” (22-23)

Klee’s angels, waiting for us in Section Two, don’t have the answers either. They’ve apparently been trying to work things out with God for a long time. The first one we meet is an “Angel in Crisis.” This angel has learned from experience that “supplication / was a three-handed thing.”

My two hands — everything

I could hold —

weren’t remotely enough

for this terrible asking.

Which seemed

beneath you, then,

as I am beneath you now.

Like a bee

at the window (27)

It’s not clear which side of the window that bee is buzzing against. Rereading the poem, and the book as a whole, I came to think of it as a sort of Schrödinger’s bee. Whether it’s praying to get in or get out, whether it lives or dies, its fate is tied to “the two-headed God / who can give / only / one answer.”(28)

In “Verso Angel,” we get the perspective of an angel who had been sketched on the back of another painting:

Klee dead. The war stumbling

on. The studio cleared.

And I had been saved

by the accident of being

not good enough to save —

which is grace, which is

both question and answer,

both shadow and tree. (46)

I would happily have spent more time with the ten angels in this section. Their confused, heartbroken, cynical, witty, profane and profound observations inspired me to run out to my local bookshop and order a copy of Ratzlaff’s Dubious Angels (2005).

“Credo,” the book’s final section, begins with a set of meditations; on art, on a single monarch fluttering about in a wilting garden, on how, at a certain point in life, the beginning of spring can fill the mind with visions of fall. And then there’s “Letter to Bob Hicok,” a gut-wrenching response to Hicok’s 2007 poem about the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, where Hicok continues to serve on the faculty. Hicok’s poem tells us that he was “trying to write that morning about a goose being chased by cows.” Ratzlaff uses that line as the epigraph for his poem, set on “my safe little college,” and advises Hicok to, “Leave the cows out of it for now.”

… Instead let there be

this line of kids from daycare,

strutting down the sidewalk

confident and chattery because

the sidewalk is safe. Let them think so. (58)

But while it’s often lurking just off stage, tragedy is certainly not the prevailing tone in this collection. These poems are full of life and self-deprecating humor. In Ratzlaff’s poetic world, he’s destined to be disappointed by his garden and apple tree. (No. Not that garden – the one in his Iowa yard.) But he’s an intrepid gardener all the same, and he’s a sucker for spring. In “Sitting Above a Ravine in Lynchburg, Virginia,” he asks:

How can I fling myself

almost to my death in a poem

when there are violets

and strawberries, a bee

broken from the tomb,

the small blue eyes

of spring beauties at the bottom? (67-68)

Wait. Could that be Schrödinger’s bee again? I guess it depends on who’s asking. Either way, this collection will leave readers eager for more.