Paul Lee
Reviews
After Rumi by Jay Ramsay,
ISBN 0-9540201-1-1, A5, The Lotus Foundation, ‘Lynwood’, 16 Lancaster Grove, London, NW3 4PB, £6.00 UK, $12 USA.
Rumi was the renowned and astonishingly prolific 13th century Sufi mystic. Jay Ramsay has written 19 ‘translations of inspiration that come from that source’, which are interspersed by 14 paintings of ‘black light’ by Genie Poretsky-Lee. The poems are by turns ecstatic, exhortatory, epiphanic, warning, or meditative, the law of love their central theme. Despite occasional infelicities - ‘into the freedom / that our insides / truly mean to reach’, ‘So heaven comes. So heaven / Blows your mind’ - the theme is well sustained and strongly sounded. Some of the poems are really powerful - ‘What is this language of death / That has us by the throat?... / What you say about the world / Is black tar in your flask.../ the ego suffers to death / But the spirit sings. I think it is right that the book is relatively short: the message would be dissipated by greater length. That message is, after all, both universal and straightforward, and one we seem incapable of learning. We need poets like Jay Ramsay.
Page(s) 23
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