Jump Straight Up
By Jarold Ramsey, BA ’59 (English)
January 2, 2024
Rushing in as a welcome surprise, these “new late poems” were mostly composed both late in the year and late in the author’s years. In Jump Straight Up, Jarold Ramsey versifies and pokes at an odd knot of themes: encroaching age overtaking a long wonderful marriage; the delights of grandparenthood; awareness of our “interspecies” situation in the everyday natural order; the blessings and challenges of Central Oregon’s canyons, summits, and rangelands; and the intriguing ways the mostly horizontal left-to-right axis of our lives seems to shift in old age toward the vertical—“way down” (and out) but also “jump straight up” (in the imagination).