Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). Subsequent volumes include: Holding Unfailing (2017), Exploring Rights (2020), And Then the Rain Came (2022) and Vital Signs (2024). Material Witness, his sixth collection, bears witness to all manner of materials: from botany, bower birds, diving bell spiders, rock formations and coral reefs to a Nazi-stamped photo of the poet's mother as well as Dante's Divine Comedy and the Las Meninas paintings of Velázquez and Picasso. In three sections - 'Scenes', 'Acts', 'Aftermaths' - Material Witness reveals an interlinking architecture, constructing a poetry profoundly wedded to the physical universe and variously concerned with love, family history, the natural world, even the simple act of stirring a cup of tea. This is a poetry that conjures in all senses 'the strange companionship of materials'.
In Material Witness, Ragg's poetic eye is forensic, gazing intently at the 'vanishing points' of heritage, inheritance and the many shades of love. Structurally, the collection coheres; its three parts echoing one another in form and observations, each subtle change of lens bringing new forces and interrogations to light, making 'the unseen/materials' seen, the act of 'impossibly witnessing' possible. Clever use of syntactical invention, scientific, literary and artistic allusions and nods to myth and legend, combine to build an architecture around the idea of home. But it is also in his mastery of the line and affinity to cadence where Ragg shines. Taking inspiration from Velázquez's 'Las Meninas' and Picasso's responses to it, these poems honour the materiality of humankind. This is a collection of profound enquiry.
- Claire Dyer
