[where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG is a rift of erasure poems which pluck a few words from Shakespeare’s sonnets and on that absent space create their own space and shape: “to still all one note.” Ratcliffe’s process, while altering, through deletion, the language of the source text, preserves Shakespeare’s spatial vision, letting words rest where they were first placed. The product of this is an array of elegantly sparse poems, a constellation of images that retain affiliation with Shakespeare’s themes while allowing the reader the freedom to conjure new ones.
Stephen Ratcliffe has published more than twenty books of poetry, including Sound of Wave in Channel (BlazeVOX, 2018), Painting (Chax, 2014), Selected Days: The Selected Poetry of Stephen Ratcliffe (Counterpath Press, 2012), which won The Poetry Center Book Award, Cloud / Ridge (BlazeVox, 2011), Conversation (Bootstrap Press, 2011), Real (Avenue B, 2007), and Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002). He has also written three books of literary criticism, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath, 2010), Listening to Reading (SUNY Press, 2000), and Campion: On Song (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). He lives in Bolinas, California and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.