© Casa Editrice L'Arcolaio, 2017
Billy Ramsell is a poet of light and silences. That light might as often be a ‘laptop’s glow’, the ‘lilac machine light’ of a hospital respirator, or the flickering of a Point of Sale device as it is the natural ‘buttery sunlight of late morning’. And those silences might — as in the prose poem, ‘The Silence Bar’ — be tainted by ‘faint hints of air-conditioning and other machine noise’; they might have become purchasable commodities that can only be defined in terms of techno music at a festival suddenly ceding to ‘the faint strains of lake-water lapping’ or of a stadium’s hush as a penalty kick is taken. But Ramsell is no less a latter-day Romantic for that. His finger is on the technological pulse, but his poems long for simplicity and self-erasure — ‘the dream of winter’ that continually threatens the formal architecture of this, his second, collection.
Dedalus Press 2013
Translated into: Italian
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