Black and Yellow Notebooks

Author: Stephen Ratcliffe

Publisher: Blazevox (2023)

"With 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 built 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