The poet Ralph Angel, acclaimed for his spare, haunting lyrics, died recently in Los Angeles with his wife, Mary, present. His books varied in their approach, but the aim was constant: a search for what Lorca called duende, which for Angel meant a quiet intensity of language that always seems elusive: “Poetry is the language in which we have no language,” he once said. That quest continued in his translations of Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song, which won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and was lauded by W. S. Merwin. He loved, he once said, the “incantatory beauty of Lorca’s music.”
Ralph Angel held a titled professorship at the University of Redlands and also taught in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Beloved as a teacher, he was known for his graceful and self-deprecating authority. Mark Cox’s comments on the loss are a perfect summary of how many of us feel: “Ralph’s poetry emanates from what I can only call his spirit, as it engaged the holiness of the dailiness around him. Like so much of our humanity, his art is at once simple and profound; oblique, yet somehow clear. It is always beautiful and set with tenderness into its forms. This is a great loss. We will deeply miss this singular voice. But how fortunate we are to have his poems.”
Ralph Angel’s “Untitled” is from Strays (Foundlings Press, 2019):
Untitled
But here in the city there are signs and crowds in the street
and a girl on a balcony
and cars that have to get through the deep shallows
or else
And there are ashes falling down the sky
from the palace of arms
to the fountain
of tears
and upon the whispering aspens
And there are naked feet and white flowers
from their hideaways
distant mother
an angel comes to me and taps
my lip
— Ralph Angel