Praise for Raising the Dead

The efficient yet supple syntax, the improvisatory gift and perfect pitch for poetry-noise --sometimes Mozartian, sometimes Parkeresque, but never atonal -- and the steady but varied pulse that enlivens every line: these are among the many technical virtues of this brilliant poet for whom wider recognition is long overdue. I first became aware of Ron Rash's work in small presses a couple of years ago and was astonished that there was a younger writer somewhere out there, far from the roller derby of the contemporary poetry scene, some lone craftsman oblivious to fashion, laboring over poems that are interesting (and profoundly interesting) to hear as well as to read. Not surprisingly, though, he is from the rural South, where the rough music of poetry lives on, unkillable by either ignorance or the stylistic deafness of certain academic poeticians. In Raising the Dead, good and evil, the living and the dead, and much of human suffering and exaltation contained therein stalk the rural earth of a people whose very blood would seem to exist by transubstantiation in Rash's true poetry of embodiment. There is nothing else quite like this work in American poetry at the present time, and we desperately need it.

~B. H. Fairchild

When the great dam-building craze swept through Australia in the mid-twentieth century, I remember how anxiously many of us surveyed our native valleys: How easy might it be to flood us out? What treasured parts of our mental map might become shining blanks? Mr. Rash's quiet, finely-evoked pictures of the social tragedy which a dam project brought down on one southern Appalachian community points out, without histrionics or accusation, the effect of prejudice on lives too remote from fashion to attract defenders. With its steady gaze through the prism of catastrophe, this quietly marvelous book evokes all the truth and bare distinctiveness of a way of life, until the doomed valley becomes a ship of the spirit from whose timber decks a great wealth of dimensions can be descried. We find ourselves in the meditative world of a native, and it proves to have immensities of resource and reach on its own terms.

~Les Murray

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