Like a Beggar

Ellen Bass's deft poetic impact and piercingly intimate voice continues an ongoing exploration of life's essential question: how exercise we become on? These poems vividly inhabit sorrow and suffering, however are rich with praise, delighting in the absurdity and sense of humor of our flawed homo intelligence. Like a Beggar handles the "the hard prove of the earth" with grace, elegantly connecting the humble to the luminous.

In Praise of the Volume

Listen to Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Philip Levine discuss with Paul Muldoon Ellen Bass's "What Did I Love" fromLike a Beggaron theNew Yorker podcast.

"There is such a sense of ritual about ['What Did I Love']. And such a clarity of purpose . . . I found it and then powerful and complex . . . such a strange and haunting collection of feelings and attitudes and it was so exquisitely done, everything was so precisely viewed. . . . She'south a poet with terrific power."—Philip Levine

"Ellen Bass has written these poems in service and commemoration of Eros, the life force that can wake u.s.a., the weary citizens of this all as well cleaved globe. The poems know what they fence with; they don't flinch. Then they sing their joy."—Marie Howe

"Ellen Bass'southward newest collection of poems shimmers with presence, ability and beauty. In information technology Bass speaks from the deepest places of the center, clearly, boldly, and with courage and grace. These are poems to be savored and devoured, over and over, for they brim with a wisdom that she clearly earns from the bully authenticity of her life. Like a Beggar is a souvenir, a approving, a map, a chronicle, a hymn, and a cry—and most of all a dazzling, masterful work of fine art." —Frank Gaspar

"The irony is thatLike a Ragamuffinis a volume about riches. These are luxurious poems, full of gorgeous language; and they also 'muddy their hands with the actual,' they 'handle the difficult evidence of the earth.' With not bad intelligence and middle, Bass wakes us up to the riches and reminds u.s.a. of our better selves. The manner Bass brings together the humble and the luminous in this elegant book sets it apart and makes information technology thrilling. Good poets help us to see the earth in a new way; not bad ones open the mind to new means of conceiving that globe and our connections to it.Like a Beggardoes this for me."—Toi Derricotte

"Observant, curious, honest, not fancy but beautifully measured and crafted, Ellen Bass's poems have on the whole cloth–she looks at wasps and bad habits and infidelity and old Jewish ladies, tomato fungus and the million other phenomena of our boilerplate lives. Plenty of bad news, here, plenty of heartbreak. Telephone call her a midwife, phone call her a priest, if y'all're from Berkeley, call her a life omnibus: in some way her poems talk usa through it. She has a radiant, capable middle, a humor, and knows her fine art. Reading her poems fills me with respect and gratitude."—Tony Hoagland

"Her words are cornball, brilliant, and visceral. . . . Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and hope of the individual. By [Like a Ragamuffin]'s cease—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is non just a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller." —Briana Shemroske, Booklist

"Exquisitely wrought in language and imagery, Ellen Bass's third collection meditates on sequencing images.  Her poems open up in ane place and close elsewhere. . . . The reader follows Bass through each line to arrive at the closing epitome, a place made more beautiful in facing what came before. . . .Bass'due south work reminds us of the hard jobs, the frigid waiting to take hold of sight of something magnificent, but Similar a Ragamuffin suggests that sometimes we catch what nosotros already had in our hands. We feast in that location, on her catastrophe images that resonate outward with the wisdom of gratitude. . . .The imagery in Like a Beggar is gorgeous." —Laura Madeline Wiseman, Ploughshares

"Bass's deftness as a poet is breathtaking in Similar a Beggar. Past which I mean: I am left breathless reading these poems and witnessing her command of the line. And so, I am equally awed by my own breathlessness, which Bass, of course, has elicited artfully through her control. Reading each poem I feel as though I take been walking upward and down the hills of Esalen with her. Like a Ragamuffin, sings with the clarity of a unmarried voice solitary in a big concert hall and with the gravitas of a full chorus in the finale of a sold out opera. These poems are large in their ambitions and precise in their observations."—Julie R. Enszer, The Rumpus

"Similar a Beggar is Ellen Bass'due south virtually recent collection. It is, hands down, the most engaging, compelling and emotionally moving collection of poems I've read this past year. Every so oft, I have the skilful fortune to read poems that resonate so deeply, they are living things that leap correct off the folio and sing the language of my soul. Like a Beggar does that for me. . . .This book is written with the heart and soul of a virtuoso artist and the sensibilities of a highly skilled artisan. (Stealing an paradigm from one of her poems) Ellen Bass uses manifestly linguistic communication to create scintillating imagery that sparkles and shines in the mode a blacksmith might pound glowing red, nearly molten metal into sturdy but cute wrought-iron implements that endure daily apply and the examination of fourth dimension with grace." —Michael Gillian Maxwell, MadHat Bulldoze-By Volume Reviews

"Ellen Bass's poems are at in one case burdensome and uplifting. The feeling yous take away after reading her newest drove, Like a Beggar, is 1 of welcome anaesthesia. In her consistently unsettling and unflappable vox, Bass shepherds her readers through the disorder of disparate images and shimmering, lovely lines. Nosotros are confronted once more and again with pain and loss and disappointment lashed together, surprisingly and all the same comfortingly, with still, simple pleasures and deep gratitude."—Maggie Trapp, dailydoseoflit.com

PBS NEWS HOUR Verse SERIES
Weekly Poem: Ellen Bass Wants Y'all to Eat That Strawberry
An Interview by Victoria Fleischer

In the commencement poem of her new collection, "Like a Ragamuffin," Ellen Bass tries to accept what she has spent her whole life fugitive: misfortune. Click here to read the entire article and hear Ellen read "Ode to Repetition".

ARTS Beat NEW YORK TIMES
Praise Poems: Ellen Bass Talks Nearly Similar a Beggar
An Interview by Dana Jennings

Ellen Bass'southward poetry drove, Similar a Beggar (Copper Canyon), pulses with sex, sense of humor and compassion. Ms. Bass takes her cues every bit a poet, and equally a person, from Rilke, whom she quotes to open "Ragamuffin": "Simply those dark, mortiferous, devastating ways,/how do you bear them, suffer them?/— I praise." Her poetry, and this volume in item, adequately bursts with such praise. Click here for edited excerpts from an electronic mail conversation with Ellen virtually poetry and more.