Silence Coming Up for Air by Ruby Turok-Squire

Ruby Turok-Squire expresses the barely expressible in poems that are as bold as they are delicate. Silence coming up for air marks an exceptional and most welcome début.

–Moniza Alvi

Yes, music haunts poetry, and poetry music, but the relationship between the two is mysterious, much easier to name than to describe. Ruby Turok-Squire‘s poems, however, with their plangent and searching sonorities and their penetrating argument, open this mystery for us. If music is the local subject, this masterful collection guides us toward a broader acknowledgement: that the human subject — whether a writer, musician, singer, or reader — is itself a kind of music, always moving, always moved, evanescent, haunting, and haunted.

–DeSales Harrison

This is poetry not so much aspiring to the condition of music as wounded by wonder at what music alone can do. The result is a fruitful meeting between the oblique and the elusive in a strikingly original attempt to trace the interface between the sensuous and the metaphysical.

–M. Wynn Thomas

This sequence of meticulously crafted poems becomes a purveyor of total experience through close and careful attention to the particulars. The materials and structures of musical performance are recruited into a figurative language which in the end leaves them behind, and does this by insisting on a fidelity to the event which makes it reverberate into the whole sphere, one word, or note, at a time. Music becomes work and act, performed reciprocally. And where does this lead us? It leads us absolutely to what we are, taking the risk, tuning ourselves to the higher tensity “as if nothing has to break”.

–Peter Riley