Guernica Editions

Edvins Raups has a truly distinctive voice as a poet. His refined and deeply metaphorical poetry (Live-Ing It, 1995; 33 Mysterious Years and Poems, 1997; cook up something transitory for me, 2002; Bird?, 2008) has garnered awards and praise with astonishing regularity from readers, critics and colleagues alike. His work has been translated and published in English, Swedish, German, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian.

His verses alarm the reader, drop hints, at times spout an aphoristic maxim, and not infrequently fade away into incoherent muttering "as he adds at the end of some poems, when lightning and thunderclaps have rolled over the reader's head and the poet-shaman, no longer in a trance, comes to his senses in a world whose simplicity and hopelessness can best be expressed by the song of a bird or the rapping of a stick on wood.

This insightful book of poetry with its powerfully structured story line and prose-worthy subject matter is as gripping as a well-written novel. The most striking of its many dimensions is its spiritual orientation, which does not seem either superfluous or slanted toward any specific author's canon. The world is eternal, all eras in principle are accessible and capable of coursing through us. And that which we truly desire is transitory and ephemeral. A pigeon returns from beyond the flux of time and history "carrying/ in its beak a sliver/of your/skin" -- and thus Raups makes it clear that metaphysics capitulates in the face of human sorrow.

Raups' poetry is best enjoyed with the lights out. There is a comfort with the darkness that is rare and exhilarating - this poetry is not apocalyptic - it is wholly accepting of fate. Raups' work is emotive, cerebral - like "a dark bruise at the temples".

Raups is an absolute poet and a poet of the absolute. He is one of the very few contemporary poets whose work is so densely intense that each of his poems forces us to realize that "words" possess immeasurable depth. This realization demands an unconditional involvement of all of one's being, mind and senses, to grasp the essence of the poem, and in so doing, the reader gets a glimpse of the absolute.