Twist the Axe

Maj Ragain

Twist the Axe is the best book I've read this year, a conglomeration of Ragain's writings on racehorses and the culture surrounding them culled from many years of work. This book collects previously published and unpublished work, poems, stories, journals, and the odd drawing or two, pairing them with newspaper clippings, result charts, family trees, and just about anything else one could think of. Ragain can lay claim to being one of the ten or twenty best poets working in America today; his distinctive poetic style, the storytelling diction Williams tried and failed to achieve time after time, meshes with the juxtaposed images of hopeless, cheap horses and the memories they raise. On one level, of course, it's all about the horses; on another level, it's about the rest of life.

Ragain never makes the reader dig too far; there are layers beneath, of course, for those who want to pursue them, but the average John Q. will certainly be able to understand the connections in “Morning Line;”

Jim Henson, father beard of muppets,
died of bacterial pneumonia, May 17, 1990.
The next day at Thistledown, fifth race,
a mare named Big Time Bird went off,
unacknowledged, at odds of 134 to 1.
Big Time Bird ran the race of her life,
drenched in and driven by grief,
the hot lasix of tears.
She finished second, a half length short,
beaten by a horse named Woman in Love.
You will never figure out this one.

This is one of those books that, if anyone outside the world of poetry knew of its existence, might have the power to draw thousands back into the fold. It is understandable, perfectly written, accessible not only to the poetry junkie but to the average reader. For most people, it's a pleasurable new world; for the chosen few who have been lucky enough to have been reading Ragain's books for longer, it will be another rest stop on the way to Paradise. They are all too few (this is Ragain's fifth book, with the first published in 1979), and should be eagerly devoured, once found.