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| Light in Hand offers selections from Ridge’s first three volumes of poetry: The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag. The poems in this volume showcase Ridge’s critical yet compassionate eye for the world around her, from the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side to the bloody frontlines of World War I. Rich with finely-drawn details of person and place, Ridge’s poems marry a materialist political sensibility with a deep spiritual belief in the ability of humankind to transcend the world’s havoc and strife. As Ridge writes in “Obliteration” of “The emptily effacing air, / That has closed upon so many cries… / Yet holds in its blue vacuum / No bleached white evidence,” it is often the work of history to bury the cries of the oppressed, as well as those who try to speak out against injustice. It was Ridge’s lifelong mission to counteract this erasure and illuminate that evidence.
“Lola Ridge stood a little apart from the rest, with what it is not too much to characterize as her own genius.” —William Rose Benét
This volume is edited, and features an introduction, by Daniel Tobin.
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From Light in Hand...
Kelvin Barry
You that walked with your head held high,
Shining and tall and straight, in the trampled morning,
Did your red young mouth
Suck in the wind as a lover sucks in a kiss that is one of the last,
As you walked with the pride in your heart
And your bare throat warm to the wishful rope
(Tighter than arm of woman was the hairy kiss of the rope),
And your face held still and high
Like a flaming lily of Saint Joseph
In the cool blue of the morning.
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