Edward Ragg's Vital Signs is a book of mourning, devotion, and creaturely alertness ('Word turned flesh like a foot in dirt'). In delicate, precise rhythms, these poems vivify our sense of the body's pulses, the beating of the heart, the vibrations of the breath. Ragg offers poetry as 'the body's other dance'. Conjuring Celan's 'worldbeat', the poet evokes Beijing snows and Durham skies, a visitation from a bat, the stamping of a bull's foot. These are tender, capacious poems of vigil and remembrance and rededication: elegizing the poet's father; addressing the beloved; limning a northern English landscape of disused mines and small villages; dreaming of 'Venice in a Beijing light'; moving among languages and inheritances. Ragg is a poet of economy, freshness, and subtle musicality. His work is open to traveler's tales and contemporary sculpture and manifests a complex historical consciousness; it bespeaks both a homing instinct and a cosmopolitan scope. We encounter a poet sounding out his vocation, 'listening to whole / bodies of poems echoing across / land and sea'. In Vital Signs, Ragg takes up the oldest tasks of the poet: to listen, to commemorate, to sing. 'Conscious the world's breath / will one day scatter us,' this poet registers 'the end of being echoing'. - Maureen N. McLane; With a deft yet emphatic touch, and by probing the things of life at a molecular level, the poems in Vital Signs continue to seek answers to the unanswerable, to the mysteries which surround and inhabit us. Here, in the conscious company of poet and poem, Edward Ragg explores the palette of the human condition, both at home in the familiar landscapes of family and away at the more foreign destinations and starting points of adulthood, until a kind of alchemy occurs that enables us - in body, pulse and breath - to savour what really matters, and to understand the intricacies of language, love and legacy. Ragg speaks of 'The gamble we take every time / we try to say what we think'. In Vital Signs this gamble pays off as 'certainly as the incoming tide'. - Claire Dyer
