Things Haven’t Been the Same by Ralph Stevens

Ralph “Skip” Stevens’ new collection, Things Haven’t Been the Same, takes us on a trip to Maine, where he writes about whippoorwills, a row of sand dollars on a picnic table, a marsh in a thunderstorm.  Of course, there’s a lighthouse.  Crows are threaded throughout, almost like a Greek chorus. These are gentle observations with lovely lyric moments: “water / dripping from the eaves – music / reviving in the darkness  / where all notes hang, / ready to fall.”  Or “a cold sea / that can’t sit still, rolling and lunging / with an energy even granite rocks / must feel.”  Anyone who loves Down East will surely enjoy this book.

–Barbara Crooker, author of The Book of Kells (Cascade Books), winner of the Best Poetry Book 2018 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Some Glad Morning (The Pitt Poetry Series)

You get the impression that these poems have been lived. Ralph Stevens writes with a clarity and authenticity that not only makes the mundane sing but shifts the old themes of nature, death and love in such a way that you have no choice but to take another look within. This book is brilliant and moved me deeply.  It grew my soul in unexpected ways.

–Cameron Blake, performer, singer-songwriter and recording artist.  Cameron’s latest album, Fear Not (2017) can be found at https://www.cameronblakemusic.com/store-2/

Fortunately for us, Ralph Stevens knows a lot about living and, thankfully, he’s willing to share.  At the same time, he continues to search for answers for what comes next.  Though he tells us early on, “Much of what we call living we learned at bedtime” and he proposes a little later, “Perhaps there’s no need after all to make sense of things,” don’t believe him for a second.  Here’s a writer who takes us on a journey through both his poetic-life and his real-life, appropriately quizzical, sometimes whimsical, but always with great wisdom.  Ralph understands the wonder of the ways of nature and the way the physical world can reflect, and even heal, the world inside ourselves.   

–Alan Walowitz, author of The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems (Truth Serum Press) and Exactly Like Love (Osedax Press)