Sounds of Summer in the Country by Michael Ruby

Birdcalls, with their mixtures of syllables and pauses, often take the exact form of our words, phrases and sentences. Working from this insight, poet Michael Ruby wrote “Scenes From a Parliament of Fowles” and “Catbird Soliloquies,” and then expanded his artistic interaction with animals to the insect and amphibian worlds of crickets, cicadas, frogs and spring peepers. Even to the inanimate world of the wind in the trees, cars passing, agricultural machines. The result is a rare fusion of the nonhuman and human, of the sounds around us and words within us. A wall of sounds/words that is simultaneously archaic and contemporary, repetitive and anarchic, and always original.


The languages of animals contain the oldest words we know. These may be the only words worth learning. Michael Ruby is one of the few who has dared to learn them, and to translate them into terms of our own time. Read this book if you want to connect to the world.

—David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, Secret Sounds of Ponds and other books


There’s a lot of delight in the syllabic chorusings of Michael Ruby’s Sounds of Summer in the Country—delight in sound, delight in language, delight in a typographic polyphony of insects, birds, garbage trucks and other sonic presences of our current existence. How can a reader resist the fey surprise of spring peepers speaking a sound-world that includes Nadine, Phnom Penh, baked beans and credit? How not to pause at the ambiguities of lines like: “Power is an aphrodisiac/Safeguard Toulouse”? This is a playful and effervescent poetry that is also a document of listening, imagination and presence.

—Evelyn Reilly, author of Styrofoam, Echolocation and other books
 




Michael Handler Ruby is a poet, literary editor and journalist. He is the author of eight other full-length poetry collections, including At an Intersection (Alef Books, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX [books], 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill Press, 2020) and Close Your Eyes, Visions (Station Hill, 2024). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes the ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). He is also the author of the ebooks Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and Compulsive Words (Argotist, 2024), and five chapbooks with the Dusie Kollektiv. He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s prose collaboration, Piece of Cake(Station Hill, 2020), and is currently co-editing the selected poems of Steve Dalachinsky. He worked for many years as an editor at The Wall Street Journal and splits his time between Brooklyn and Gallatin, N.Y.



Book Information:

· Paperback: 104 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-489-5

$18