{"id":880,"date":"2022-10-05T15:00:57","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T19:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=880"},"modified":"2022-11-09T15:41:27","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T20:41:27","slug":"book-review-a-cluster-of-noisy-planets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/book-review-a-cluster-of-noisy-planets\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Review: A Cluster of Noisy Planets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>A Cluster of Noisy Planets <\/em>by Charles Rafferty. Rochester, NY, BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001, 80 pages. $17.00, paperback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>A Cluster of Noisy Planets<\/em> by Charles Rafferty is an account of the melancholic passing of time, expressed through lovely observations of our world. Reading these prose poems aloud, one can sense the soft drumming of Rafferty\u2019s carefully constructed sentences. He is a true syntactical master at work: the rhythm\u2014generated with simple commas and full stops\u2014magnifies the tender, slow beauty of this close attention. Not only do these words, spoken aloud, create intimacy, they create quiet. One poem from the collection that comes to mind is named, \u201cThe Satin Lining of the Casket Reminds Me of a Jewelry Box,\u201d in which the speaker addresses the odd objects that are often buried with the dead; yet, as peculiar as the subject of this poem may sound, the last two sentences are magnificent in their scope and beautification of the mundane: \u201cWe pack them in like we\u2019re burying pharaohs, like there\u2019s a pyramid of grief above them. And there is\u2014only smaller, and made of dirt, in a land that won\u2019t stop raining\u201d (Rafferty 17). This short quote, two of the many wonderful sentences from this collection, recalls another aspect of this poetry collection worth mentioning: the role of objects and monuments. Rafferty fixates on the various artifacts which have withstood time, such as the Great Pyramids of Giza, The Roman Colosseum, and the Moon. Above all, these prose poems show the ongoing, continual movements of the human imagination, exemplified by an excellent poet who writes these love letters from his corner of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014Lucas Clark, MAR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Cluster of Noisy Planets by Charles Rafferty. Rochester, NY, BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001, 80 pages. $17.00, paperback. A Cluster&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[59,61,46,60,29,58],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-a-cluster-of-noisy-planets","tag-boa-editions","tag-book-review","tag-charles-rafferty","tag-poetry","tag-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":901,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}