Earth on Earth

"A kind of translation of a thousand-year-old poem, "Earth took of Earth," this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both danger and of consolation from earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, continually rhymes with Ramke's attempts to understand damages done, but also to celebrate the facts of earth-as, for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is a play on the phrase "heaven on earth": no, the very best-and it is a lot-to hope for is earth on earth"--