Vital Signs - Paperback

Vital Signs - Paperback

$20.16
Skip to product information
Vital Signs - Paperback

Vital Signs - Paperback

$20.16

by Edward Ragg (Author)

Vital Signs draws on the inspiration of the medical vital signs in three parts-'Body', 'Pulse' and 'Breath'-each with nine poems that explore romantic love, death and the experiences of grief and loss in a poetry that is as embodied, pulsing with life and rhythmically breathing.


"Edward Ragg's Vital Signs is a book of mourning, devotion, and creaturely alertness ('Word turned flesh like a foot in dirt'). In delicate, precise rhythms, these poems vivify our sense of the body's pulses, the beating of the heart, the vibrations of the breath. Ragg offers poetry as 'the body's other dance'. Conjuring Celan's 'worldbeat', the poet evokes Beijing snows and Durham skies, a visitation from a bat, the stamping of a bull's foot. These are tender, capacious poems of vigil and remembrance and rededication: elegizing the poet's father; addressing the beloved; limning a northern English landscape of disused mines and small villages; dreaming of 'Venice in a Beijing light'; moving among languages and inheritances. Ragg is a poet of economy, freshness, and subtle musicality. His work is open to traveler's tales and contemporary sculpture and manifests a complex historical consciousness; it bespeaks both a homing instinct and a cosmopolitan scope. We encounter a poet sounding out his vocation, 'listening to whole / bodies of poems echoing across / land and sea'. In Vital Signs, Ragg takes up the oldest tasks of the poet: to listen, to commemorate, to sing. 'Conscious the world's breath / will one day scatter us, ' this poet registers 'the end of being echoing'."

-Maureen N. McLane


"With a deft yet emphatic touch, and by probing the things of life at a molecular level, the poems in Vital Signs continue to seek answers to the unanswerable, to the mysteries which surround and inhabit us. Here, in the conscious company of poet and poem, Edward Ragg explores the palette of the human condition, both at home in the familiar landscapes of family and away at the more foreign destinations and starting points of adulthood, until a kind of alchemy occurs that enables us - in body, pulse and breath - to savour what really matters, and to understand the intricacies of language, love and legacy. Ragg speaks of 'The gamble we take every time / we try to say what we think'. In Vital Signs this gamble pays off as 'certainly as the incoming tide'."

-Claire Dyer

Number of Pages: 62
Dimensions: 0.15 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: December 14, 2023

Made with care

Great value

Elegant design

Quality materials

Details

This product is crafted with quality materials to ensure durability and performance. Designed with your convenience in mind, it seamlessly fits into your everyday life.

Shipping & Returns

We strive to process and ship all orders in a timely manner, working diligently to ensure that your items are on their way to you as soon as possible.

We are committed to ensuring a positive shopping experience for all our customers. If for any reason you wish to return an item, we invite you to reach out to our team for assistance, and we will evaluate every return request with care and consideration.

Play video

Shop The Full Collection

" Elegant LED Light Ring Box: Perfect for Engagement & Wedding Gifts - Keep Your Jewelry Safe & Secure! & Secure!"

" I Love Biking" Ornament

" I Love Biking" Ornament

Sale price  $7.99 Regular price $8.95

"27": How it's going so Far... - Paperback

"A Hero Will Endure": Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of 'Gladiator' - Paperback