ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Celebrated poet and professor Lawrence Raab’s tenth collection of poetry is one of mysterious and visionary sight, quiet music, and the unaffected stillness of reflection that is common to masterpieces capable of holding their potency for generations.”
—Marina Brown, Los Angeles Review
“Every poem in April at the Ruins is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us…. Raab’s sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due.”
—Amy Gerstler
“[T]his collection isn’t just nostalgic. Instead, it is full of wonder. Wonder and the ability to step through wonder into a whole new place.”
—Alexis David, Compulsive Reader

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lawrence Raab is the author of nine books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. An earlier collection, What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993) was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book of poems is The Life Beside This One (Tupelo 2017). He is also the co-author (with Stephen Dunn) of a chapbook of collaborative poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea. In 2016 Tupelo published his collected essays, Why Don’t We Say What We Mean? He is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College, where he taught for forty-two years.

REVIEWS

Lawrence Raab has long been one of American poetry’s most authentic, most perfectly modulated voices. Yet in these new poems, he boldly risks unguarded measures and urgent sounds. This is a book of summonings: into the dark wood; into the night music which might be, if memory proves to be something other than an abyss, the frontier of eternity. There are supernal tensions on every page here, and everywhere, just at the horizon, unprecedented daybreak.
—Donald Revell

The poems in Lawrence Raab’s April at the Ruins are rooted in the acknowledgment that the past we live with is in good part dream and fairy tale, that our present seems curiously frail and ephemeral, and that life viewed in retrospect appears by turns accidental and inevitable. By refusing to reach easy solutions, by a willingness to find a home in uncertainty and doubt, the poems achieve an integrity that is bracing and deeply moving.
—Carl Dennis

Lawrence Raab is a genuinely dark philosophical poet, a lifelong and expert student of lucid dreaming and paradox— the sensation of waking up to the fact of being asleep. His poems lead you into, then trap you, in strange worlds, boxes constructed of story, logic, and aphorism, which are then revealed to be exactly like life itself.
—Tony Hoagland

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS

1

Lost 5
In the Earliest Days 6
After the Sky Had Fallen 7
False Dawn 10
Perhaps 11
A Little Music 13
A Children's Story 14

2

My Expedition 19
Pastoral 21
The Minor Characters 22
The Weird Museum 24
You Never Actually Die When You Die in a Dream 25
Moon and Sun 27
A Long Train Ride to the Sea 28
Death of the Invisible Man 30
The Awful Pleasures 32

3

The Saint in the Painting 37
Pleasures of a Minor God 39
Just Now 41
The Beautiful Afternoon of Chance 43
Why We Are Here 44
One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other 47
What We Did Yesterday 48
Little Ritual 51
For Us 52

4

The Muse Explains 57
Stopping by Woods 59
One of Those Secret Lives 61
Twilight 63
When You Find Yourself Remembering Yourself 66
History 69
Lies 71
April at the Ruins 73

5

Swan Song. 79
"The World Provides Evidence for Almost Anything" 81
God Considers His Losses 83
The Next Moment 85
Until Evening 87
Hometown 88
In America 91
At First They Seemed Like Strangers 93