Lexical Alchemy

The cover blurb to Ralphs’s debut full-length collection positions her as a ‘modern metaphysical’ – an insightful assertion. Ralphs’s own words in ‘Note on Spelling’ (itself an interesting insinuation of craft/spellcraft/alchemic etymology) outline four distinctive lexical ingredients, each potentially performing the conditions of a ‘modern metaphysical’. It’s true to say she is modern in terms of being modernist (a self-proclaimed Auden devotee), that the collection is ‘meta’ – both transformative and transcendent – and that it is not only ‘metaphysical’ in its allusions to Donne and Herbert, but in its use of the ‘physic’, as a salve or boon for wounded times and wounded tongues. Perhaps none of this is particularly worth highlighting, except that Ralphs herself seems aware of these definitions. Point 2 of ‘Note on Spelling’ offers ‘VISUAL ONOMATOPOEIA: a word or sentence may not only sound like what it represents, but look or behave like it too’. Interestingly, ‘meta’ is defined as ‘showing an explicit awareness of itself: cleverly self-referential’. Something of the metaphysical conceit lies in wait. Could it be that throughout the collection Ralphs demonstrates a keen awareness of the poet qua poet – a metaphysical discernment of the prosodic process, within it, ‘a kind of lexical alchemy’ akin to the very kind of spell craft required to showcase an unlikely tribe of witches, a disrupted book of Common Prayer(s), an invocation and evocation of John Dee’s numinous traversing? Here too, is the radical exploitation of interiority and exteriority, of perceptual self-awareness framed by the enigmatic, self-consuming title attuned to our era: ‘After You ...