Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake by Bill Ratner
Poetry Review
written by: Art Hanlon
Bill Ratner’s latest book of poems, Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake, is utterly serious, subtly hopeful, even subtly amusing in its way, and yet the subject of an intense meditation that tries to understand and cope with the inexplicable fact of suffering. Ratner’s new collection contains poems that explore the possibility of finding a moral compass to guide us through an unrelenting and unforgiving valley of travail. Every poem in this collection represents a concentrated moment when everything hangs in the balance. What does it take, this beautiful collection of poems asks, to tip the balance? Is everything in the universe, like, empty?
Bill Ratner is on his way to legendary status. If you know him at all, you probably know him as a voice actor. He’s all voice—”Flint” on the G.I. Joe TV cartoon, the disembodied but recognizable one who announces movie trailers, narrates documentaries, TV & radio, news of the day, a town crier, a world-weary storyteller telling tales on National Public Radio, a regular competitor in the Moth, a nine-time Moth StorySLAM winner. He’s written books and essays, but what is less well known, until now, is his unscripted interior voice mediated on this occasion by this astonishing book of poetry.
Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake is organized into two parts. Part 1: Youth is a saga that explores the murky turmoil of family life as Bill re-imagines his point of view as a young boy—its emotional depths, grief, inexplicable loss in a phase of life that is transitory by nature. Bill’s poems in Part 1 are memory fragments, sudden and beautiful no matter how grotesque the circumstances. Take They Shall Be Comforted, the first poem in the collection:
She showed me the scar where her breast had been
shoulders arched back
soft curls the color of elms
like Joan Blondell in Three on a Match
inquisitive, lead pencil thin.
Bill plumbs tragedy for the hidden beauty of the human. The harshness of the juxtaposition in the lines above is ameliorated by the caring gentleness of his description. He goes on to fill Youth with vignettes and weighted scenes sharpened with subtle (not to mention irreverent) humor as in these lines from Breaking Wind, a poem (that could have easily been titled Jeremiah’s Lament) that brashly interrogates God:
My first brush with God I pumped my trike fast
up the driveway, stomach gas filling me
I tried to hold it.
My older brother shouted Stop breaking wind!
I apologized to God I am sorry for breaking wind.
Later, in the same poem, after Bill balances all and brings all to mind, and after the prayers and spiritual petitioning fail to stop the fatal decline in health of Bill’s brother, he ends the poem with the lines:
Months drew on, my brother’s health dwindled
I continued to pray. After he died
I think I issued one last prayer:
Thanks for nothing.
Thanks for less than nothing.
This is a different—an alternate—Book of Lamentations. These lines Thanks for less than nothing delivered with anguished force reveal how slender the line is that divides prayer from curse. Ambiguity redeems nothing. Both are a form of prayer. To read Bill Ratner’s poetry is to take pleasure in reading the rhythmic vigor, the steady iambic pace, the blending of irony and sincerity, the celebration of the genuine. Lamenting While Doing Laps is a radical work of art that defies self-pity without invoking anger or succumbing to despair.
If the Youth section looks to the past, Part 2, titled Age is set in the present and told from the perspective of a speaker who is finally at home in his own skin and who has come to accept and integrate his past in the form of memories and stories. He still returns a cold eye back on Youth, and although he is hooked on memory, he has set it at a habitable distance.
I thank my grandson Sage for being.
I call out for my brother
his handsome photos—young, alive, green-eyed.
I bounce on my father’s belly,
hug his neck and howl some more.
And my mother, how long I remember,
beautiful, struck down in innocence and sadness.
Where’s the moon, Boppa, my grandson asks
at the park as the sun goes down
Where’s the moony moon?
There is more of the material world in this section as well. And this is welcome. Bill’s ability to describe the world where he lives is taut and lush. The speaker is confident. A noter of telling detail. In the last poem, Our Losses Return to Us, the speaker’s late mother has appeared in a dream like an ancient celebrity in a hotel / with an appointment secretary. The dream establishes its protocols and rules, actual communication too fragile to sustain. But the speaker has adapted to a life that has so many crucial absences. He now knows how to keep anger in check and to let it ease out–stiletto-like—often with a twist, almost unnoticed as an afterthought.
I need to tell her
how hard it was to do without her
Perhaps I am being unfair
a bit too needful
Promptly the dream slides away
like lamb from a meat slicer
Finally, Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake is a literary achievement as well as a solace and a comfort to its readers. Bill Ratner has worked with language all his professional life. Czesław Miłosz famously said “Language is the only homeland.” If that is true, Bill Ratner is proprietor and landlord. We owe him thanks.
- Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake - April 1, 2025
