Good evening and hello.
Boyer Rickel is the author of a collection
of poems called "arreboles" from Wesleyan University
Press, a memoir in essays called "Taboo" in the University
of Wisconsin's Living Out series,
and of a new collection of poems called "remanence."
He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship in poetry, and his work
appears widely and regularly in literary journals,
including Kenyon Review, Sonora Review, Volt, Harvard Review,
Ploughshares and CUE.
He has been a sought-out and adored teacher
of poetry in the MFA program here where
he has taught since 1991.
Readers and critics have called his work variously
evocative, moving, fragile, balanced, brilliant,
self-possessed, fearless, sane, edgy, devoted, calm.
From the start, what I have responded to perhaps most,
is Rickel's poetic ear.
The power of this ear to transform the settings
and dramas of the body into the rarefied and pristine durations
in time.
The childhood memory of a parakeet, a boat made of ice,
seagulls in formation in reflection,
the worn face of a fresco, the mind's tribunal,
are all elevated, examined, given eternal station
in the pantheon of hours that become
Rickel's essays and his poems.
The prose poems of his most recent collection
are a fissured, risky demonstration
of what Rosmarie Waldrop calls gap gardening.
Spare, obsessed with synaptic pause,
each poem accrues through association and indirection.
By way of a sometimes loose sometimes terse lyric
parsing of concept and materials,
Rickel tracks the ghost-ridden voices in matter
and the mattering of meaning.
In all his work, mellifluous and fiery constructions
push us beyond the comforts of Earth
and hearth toward the transforming destruction
promised by the fire.
His is a body of work in which we are dressed and redressed,
masked and unmasked, stripped down
but not judged, or, if judged, condemned to a life saturated
by the senses, saturated by the undeniable sense in which
and sense of us.
And, besides that, Boyer is my best friend
in a life that has blessed us both with more than one
best friend.
And to appropriate a line from Lorca
about one of his dear friends, "Boyer Rickel comes flying."