Steeplechase

Beginning with the first few words of Steeplechase, ‘Not mine but I’ll take some— / not too much,’ you can be sure Angela Ball will engage you with care, with wit, with every magical thing a poem can do. Her way forward always includes a few back and forth and sideways steps. She offers us ‘Belief / that no knowledge is permanent / or impossible.’ If it’s an autobiography you want, if it’s biography, if it’s how to grieve, if it’s romance, you will find it in Ball’s Steeplechase. You will also find yourself smack dab in the middle of poetry unlike any other, with ‘play kisses that are real,’ and where smiles can be camouflage, and a steeple may be raised high up to show the faithful the way to church. I love to give a book like this to a friend, to read it with me, to keep it close by.

In Steeplechase, Angela Ball lifts the act of selection into a true sacrament. And in that sacramental action, the ethical and the aesthetic miraculously combine. These are poems in which memory is not merely a substance, but a principle—one whose sole criterion is Goodness, which in Ball’s unfailing vision, proves to be identical with Beauty. How splendid it is to read a poet in whom one may place absolute trust! And who would have imagined that simple trust could be so absolute a pleasure? Steeplechase is a book that makes me dare to hope for the future of our poetry.

Again and again, I am shocked by Angela Ball’s breathtaking imagination. The poems in these pages don’t remind me of another poet’s work, but they do sometimes make me think of the novelist Milan Kundera, who like Ball could explore the weightiest subject matter with playfulness and grace. Steeplechase is not just Ball’s best book. It’s the most memorable poetry collection I have read in many years.