Lawrence Raab

Biography

Lawrence Raab is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Probable World (Penguin, 2000), What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003). He has also published a chapbook of collaborative poems with Stephen Dunn, Winter at the Caspian Sea (Palanquin Press, 1999). His poems have appeared in several editions of The Best American Poetry, in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things, and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

See Work

POETRY / Autumn 1990

Ghost Stories

By Lawrence Raab

Out of a patch of fog, or the branches
of a broken tree, or as a light
suddenly aglow on the ceiling—
they assemble themselves, and briefly appear.

POETRY / Summer 1999

Big Ideas

By Lawrence Raab

I read the papers and think about hatred:
and the way ideas, especially big ideas,
look more and more like excuses for hatred.

POETRY / Autumn 1990

Something Sensible About Desire

By Lawrence Raab

If we agree that the truth is never
  only what we want to believe,
the urgent arguments of desire

still have the body’s weight behind them,
 the weight of the bully who tells you
what to say and then makes sure you mean it.

POETRY / Summer 1999

The Questions Poems Ask

By Lawrence Raab

Watching a couple of crows
playing around in the woods, swooping
in low after each other, I wonder
if they ever slam into the trees.

POETRY / Winter 1994

Daily Life

By Lawrence Raab

We knew the rat in the crawlspace
was chewing on something essential.
But who’d go down to set the traps?
The house was ours—wasn’t it my duty
to protect it?

POETRY / Winter 2003

The Invisible Hand

By Lawrence Raab

No, I just can’t write today, I said
to myself, sprawling on the couch, my mind
an open invitation to sleep, when there it was:
The Invisible Hand. A title. Having arrived
unbidden, it felt like inspiration,

POETRY / Winter 1994

The Uses of Nostalgia

By Lawrence Raab

Twenty years ago there was a life for each of us
to turn away from
or embrace. A song returns to remind me
of what I must have felt,
and when it’s over, I play it back again.

POETRY / Winter 2003

Camouflage

By Lawrence Raab

The poem that argues successfully against death
finds its place in the book you can buy
in stores that do not sell poetry.

POETRY / Summer 1999

Permanence

By Lawrence Raab

I can’t remember how old I was,
but I used to stand in front
of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine
what it would be like to be dead.

POETRY / Autumn 1977

A Night’s Museum

By Lawrence Raab

William Blake saw an angel
sitting in a tree. Blondin crossed Niagara
on a cable. And Maria Taglioni
for a Russian highwayman
danced on a panther’s skin spread over the snow
in 1855.