The Soul We Share

In visceral, vulnerable poetry, Ricky Ray softens the ache of living in a disabled body with the joy of ’being lived’ by the places he calls home. As we accompany him and his soul dog, Addie, through scenic woodlands, cities and swamps, the lines between humans, animals and nature begin to blur and move in concert. We encounter an existence lived not ’upon / but as one’ with the Earth, ’whose being we are throughout and beyond our brief sojourn as mammals’. At the heart of this collection is Ray’s intertwined life with an old brown dog, a relationship which reveals that soul isn’t merely an energetic trace we possess-it’s an animacy deeply shared.

＂These moving, well-made poems follow the author’s meditative engagement with a beloved companion dog but also with creatures of other kinds and most particularly with the earth itself. These are poems of true immersion in the belief of the earth as Gaia, whilst at the same time making known and felt the author’s painful and disabling condition, his everyday life and his hopes for the future. Unlike any other collection I have come across, these poems are remarkable in their success in showing the reader both a deeply personal and a universal story.＂

-Dr. Maura Dooley, citation for the Aryamati Prize

＂These shadows passing - / are they birds of prey / or whole days I stayed in bed,＂ writes Ricky Ray, in lyrics that are as precise as they are evocative. Poet is a professor of the senses, Lorca told us, and you can surely see how the poems here stand with this notion. Exploring subjects as different (or similar!) as body, family, theft, place, pain and rupture, the poet teaches us that understanding (＂at night, when Addie sniffs the snow for deer / and I sniff the smoke from the neighbor’s / chimney for understanding＂) comes spoken in tongues, and if ＂at some point the body cannot pull its cart,＂ it then ＂becomes the cart, while the spirit steps down / from the seat, picks up the cart and hauls.＂ Indeed. These are beautiful poems, built to last.＂

-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

＂Ray’s poetry enacts that rare poetic alchemy of infusing craft with an actual heartbeat. The language here pulses, paws, pushes us into a more expanded, animistic sense of what it means to be in relationship with one another in the more-than-human world.＂

-Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway