Love Among the Yearlings

Love Among the Yearlings represents over thirty years of Vic Ramirez's poems composed in the US, Great Britain and Scotland, Algeria, Nigeria, Japan, and Spain. The gist of the collection is straightforward: love's many seasons and faces. Our language has but this one word to express a range of emotions that shift, lack wholeness, ring as eternally as the breathing of the cosmos, are ineffable yet can be suggested in one breath, or a leaf. Through this work's many voices, love reveals itself to be a struggle, for love inhabits the same terrain as all human passion, especially fear, rage, ecstasy, compassion, pity, and at-one-ness with another or the world. The book's motif tracks our quest, as Robert Graves would put it, for that miracle of "absolute love continuing between a man and a woman," for personal identity, and ultimately, for connection to others. Love Among the Yearlings' chapters, "worrying the light," "the one I treated worst, I loved best," and "in hamburger storms," bring us to familiar and unfamiliar lands where "love was a yearling once, in the sun at the start of the day ." And where for yearlings, at least, this oldest aspect of what it is to be human is always burgeoning, always becoming dust, always becoming fire.