Matt Rasmussen’s award-winning Black Aperture is a powerful exploration of his brother’s suicide and the aftermath, a book that questions, that explores, that clarifies the difficulty of living that permeates the loved ones who are left behind. With elegiac concentration, Rasmussen writes perfectly sparse poems that are meticulous in their language. Rooted by concrete images of fields, deer, an open refrigerator door, the “white plate / my flashlight made / on the snowfield,” these poems move beyond the literal to figurative, lyric dreamscapes that allow the poet to explore the unanswered questions that swirl around such a painful loss.Rasmussen is present in these poems: as he’s pushed into a locker by a boy who doesn’t know yet about the suicide, in the moment that he has to erase his brother’s voice on the family’s answering machine. Yet, the poems move far beyond the first person to open the aperture wide. As Rasmussen writes in “After Suicide,” “A hole is nothing / but what remains around it.” The beautifully-written poems are intense, moving, and honest. Ramussen's Black Aperture is a series of short works, including a sequence of 13 poems (each of which is entitled X) called "Elegy in X Parts."Ramussen's brother's suicide forms a central event in this collection, as evident from the 3 poems titled "After Suicide" in this collection. Imagery motifs frequently cycle through the poems -- dead leaves, guns, notes, birds. I must say that the images are very well-chosen in this selection, as they grew to embody the sense of vacancy from the loss of a loved one. Ramussen's writing is also an embodiment of the fragmentary experience that follows in the wake of death, as a single image blows up and warps into an entire world, consuming like a dream you cannot wake from. At the same time, the collection, taken together forms a sense of wholeness. " A hole is nothing/but what remains around it" Ramussen writes, and he has done a good job showing us not only what remains around the hole, but its darkness and depth.Ramussen has has a very good balance of voice in the collection, never melodramatic and gushy with the emotional burdens of death, his lyricism is punctuated with narratives that could alternately be self-deprecating satire or the painful expression of loss -- "I wait for the lawn to ring/while the cord sprouts/and a receiver blooms/like a black cucumber."Black Aperture is apparently a work of narrative healing - a reconciliation of meaning in the wake of loss and emptiness, but it is also an exquisite collection from a clear-headed, observant and lyrical voice. Through the beauty of language, we witness also its power to shoulder so much of the pain of the writer, and give it shape.
What do You think about Black Aperture (2013)?
I must say this is a very good first collection.
—alli
