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MOTION OF THE CYPHER

by Ray DiPalma

"In Motion of the Cypher Ray DiPalma's glyphic, synaesthetic formulations transport us quickly to the nether regions of life and the poetic imagination where "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Still only brings us to Wednesday" and ".... vicious disclosures about criteria/... form an entire government out of amnesiacs." Sometimes angry, always truthful, these poems unite exquisite musicality with a philosophically incisive eye, a rare combination."- Nick Piombino

"Ray DiPalma's 'cypher' moves elegantly from self-reflective irony to earnest speculation. He speculates on time, paradox, and measurements ,just like Heraklitus. And like that good man, he likes to watch it move."- Andrei Codrescu

"There's a hard earned and comforting brightness in these poems, like a light in an old time window. Their reflective propositions mark the familiar human seasons with like sense. Their wisdom reads: "The infinite to be/two/one and the same thing..." This is company that won't ever go out of business."- Robert Creeley

"Ray DiPalma's taut and tightly patterned new collection of poems,"fosters," in the words of the title poem, "the once organized/imperfect/outside/that was the model/of center." For DiPalma, opposites must confront one another, and so "outside" becomes "inside,""Sprawl" becomes "pattern," "impulse" becomes "order." These chiseled lyric meditations recall Wallace Stevens in their density, but they are written under the sign of Dada-appropriate for the late twentieth century, that casts a cold eye on the margins, the spaces between, where we live. As DiPalma has titled one of his poems: "An Inch of Optimism a Mile of Rigor.""- Marjorie Perloff