Hungry Ghost Surrenders His Tackle Box

By Maj Ragain

Poetry. Poems of daily diligence, attenuated to the rhythms of rural life, meet with poems of Buddhist inspired meditations on how these rhythms fit into larger life patterns in Maj Ragain's latest... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886350485
• ISBN13: 9781886350489
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Pavement Saw Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Age Range: 15 years and up

Customer Reviews

Another winner from Ragain.

Major Ragain, A Hungry Ghost Surrenders His Tacklebox (Pavement Saw Press, 2006) If Major Ragain isn't the best poet Ohio has ever produced-- and he may well be-- he's certainly in the top five. Ragain is a poet of the mundane, who looks at the everyday and writes about it in such a way that the events of one life are made universal; in this, he most resembles (in my experience, anyway) Hayden Carruth, one of the best poets of his generation. That said, there's no mistaking a Maj Ragain poem for anything else; his voice is distinct, unique, and wonderful. "I saw Gail Ray a last time. She leaned to me, whiskey breath, mascara wink, and pulled down the black scoop top to show me a new tattoo on her left [...], a rose abloom in three colors.... Gail Ray laughed and pointed to a barechested wild boy at the bar, stumbling around in one boot, mud in his hair. She whispered to me, Look at him. He walked twenty miles tonight down from Newton to beg me to marry him and if it gets dark enough, I just might." ("Gail Ray's Drowning in Olney Poem") Ragain's stuff does exactly what poetry is supposed to do, and does it surpassing well. If you're a fan of poetry, and even if you're not-- as with his previous book, Twist the Axe: A Horseplayer's Story, Ragain interweaves poetry with short nonfiction prose pieces here-- Maj Ragain is a guy with whom you want to be familiar. Fantastic stuff, and this will certainly be on my ten best reads of 2007 list. **** ½