Black and Yellow Notebooks by Stephen Ratcliffe

With the Black and Yellow Notebooks, Stephen Ratcliffe adds another volume to his previously published Rocks and More Rocks -- which, taken together, constitute a remarkable High Sierras literature, that, like John Muir’s, stands as hymn to and testament of the experience of being among peaks. Ratcliffe’s many works are everywhere and always build on strict musical form. In these new works he uses four line stanzas in sets of five, five syllables per line, without sentence breaks, that feel like breath, the deep regular breath a hiker breathes while immersed in the rhythm of alpine walking. Where Muir’s soaring romanticism focuses on the mountains’ echo within the human soul, Ratcliffe’s steady and repetitive music gives us the mountains themselves: silent rock, sky, cloud, lake, in light and shadow by day; by night meteors shooting through the star-studded deep black. These are thrilling, mesmerizing, elemental poems.

-- Norman Fischer

These two notebook poems, written during backpacking trips in the Eastern Sierra, continue Stephen Ratcliffe’s ongoing concerns with environment, perception, and the durations of affect. His tightly focused four line, five syllable lined stanzas move between local details of campsite and trail and vast panoramas of rock, water, and weather. Ratcliffe never separates the perception of near and far, creating a constantly oscillating awareness of place as a phenomenological condition, “that moment showing / itself being seen.” Not since Gary Snyder’s early poems has a poet so accurately mapped the movement of walking and observing in these spectacular landscapes. Few poets of the recent period inhabit real time with such dedication and grace.

-- Michael Davidson

The wonderful momentum of Ratcliffe’s clipped language echoes the staccato footsteps of his week-long hikes. It’s walking art in the tradition of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, yet kept in motion through a constantly shifting, ever-piercing attention that keeps the reader acutely present to the changing light, the passing crows, and the meteors streaking through the August night sky. To enter this book is to go uncommonly outside.

-- Cole Swensen

You can write as if a monist, but that doesn't mean you are a monist. Otherwise, the myriad particulars of landscape, weather, sunrise, stars, time, mind, or language would simply be what they are—and accessible only under unique circumstances. That is not Stephen Ratcliffe's method—the gap between two cell phone photos is never the same gap. The same goes for word succeeding word and line following line in four-line stanzas in nonproportional type, transcribed from the irregularity of hand writing. And thus of interest we feel, as readers. I am writing this sentence by the shore of Barrett Lake, but I cannot tell you which lake. Everything is perspectival.

-- Barrett Watten

Interview with Stephen Ratcliffe in Alta:
‘The Walt Whitman of Bolinas’
Stephen Ratcliffe’s thousand-page books of poems contain multitudes.
BY FORREST GANDER

Stephen Ratcliffe’s most recent books are Barbara Guest & Stephen Ratcliffe : Letters (Chax, 2022), Some Time and speaking of now (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022 and 2021), Rocks and More Rocks (Cuneiform, 2020), and sound of wave in channel (BlazeVOX [books], 2018). His ongoing series of seven 1,000-page poems written in 1,000 consecutive days is available at Editions Eclipse (http://eclipsearchive.org/editions.html) and his daily poems + photographs are at stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com. The poems in Black and Yellow Notebooks were written in two notebooks (one black the other yellow) on three backpacking trips in the High Sierra in August 2018, 2020 and 2021. He has lived in Bolinas, California since 1973.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 74 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-435-2