Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck

Possum Nocturne

Snail Mail Purchase (U.S Mail) Add to Canvas Bag (online purchase)

With Possum Nocturne, Doug Ramspeck adds his rich voice to the chorus of poetry flourishing in the heartland ranging from the American Southwest to the Midwest. He knows the names of native species—leatherleaf and buffalo bur, purple gallinule and cottonmouth—and knows the ways of their living and dying. This new poet knows his tropes and line-breaks, too, for his work shines with the burnish of rigorous craft: like Ted Kooser or John Knoepfle, Doug Ramspeck sings tight songs and tells strong stories. And like no one else he gives us the clarity of insight that grows out of alert, sympathetic living: “We judge an hour by its / proximity to longing,” he says in “Marsh.” I am grateful for the gifts of this fine book. —David Baker

Doug Ramspeck’s superb collection Possum Nocturne is a study of moonlight reading the water, of ghosts whispering just out of hearing, of skulls that prophecy from dark sockets. What do these signs and totems intend for us? “The scooped weight of memory / washing across / the hollowed fur.” Ramspeck is by turns seer, trickster, medium through the enchanted and harrowing night. I think highly of these poems, which by turns frighten and delight me. “Land stares at you.” From the first page to the last, the poet recovers the bones from a covetous earth. Listen to them, he says. Here’s how.
—Gaylord Brewer

Vestigial, atavistic, the poems in this fine collection are wonderfully troubling. Ramspeck is a scavenger, a nocturnal one with fifty teeth and a hairless snout for rooting through our residue, our swamps, our feral evenings. Now is the hour of the possum. You won’t put this book of poems down, but bring a flashlight and steel your nerves. —Bruce Guernsey

About the Author

Doug Ramspeck is the author of Black Tupelo Country, which received the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for poetry, and is published by BkMk Press. He is also the author of Where We Come From (March Street Press). In 2009 he was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches at The Ohio State University at Lima. He lives with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee.

Selected Poem: Gift Skull

For years she kept it hanging like a mute wind chime
from a sweetgum limb near her tomato plants.
A bleached possum skull she’d discovered
with her fingers while planting seeds. The dead mother us,
she thinks each time she sees it, as though we suckle
at the open eye socket, as though fifty teeth are the only
comfort we can know. Once she watched a marsh hawk
struck by a pickup while it was swooping low across the road.
The bird lived for a few moments in the drainage ditch:
twitching like an epileptic, gathering itself in the great shroud
of wings. Sometimes the wind sways the skull as though the ghost
in it has come alive. She might be watching from the window
or kneeling before her vines, and the gift of the moving skull
reminds her of rocking a child in a cradle, reminds her
of gripping her knees and rolling forward then backward
and then weeping. After her infant son died, her breasts
were still heavy and swollen with milk. She imagined
it as ghost milk. And after the hawk grew still, she stood
at the side of the road and thought of the possum
waddling once out of the woods and now swaying
as a skull on a string, the wind rolling through its open
eye sockets and along the great profusion of its teeth.

Back to last page (Books & more)