The Eyes of a Vertical Cut

by Ronald Wardall. 32 pp. Slipstream Press. slipstreampress.org

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Ronald Wardall has a way of seeing a man pickled in a six-foot glass jar. And a way of writing about his grandmother Mary’s meeting death. And seeing things, like Hemingway’s suicide. And in his poem called: Patsy Cline, “I had he taste on my lips, like rust.” I too had the taste of rust and winter and the smell of, “Egyptian perfume meant for the underarms of the dead.” His poems strike deep - an injection with a thin needle, almost invisible, bubbling with imagination into the a real vein. Afterwards, you thirst. Throbbing, striking with a little sweet red blood, striking what Wardall finds and defines in the real of our everydays. What he sees is really what I really think is there, dense, thickly complex with flowers and thorns, moments of clarity enhanced with art.