The Blue Train and Other Poems
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-90564
ISBN 0-9624746-0-6
88 pages perfect-bound
1990
Foreword by William Stafford

WILLIAM STAFFORD'S FOREWORD

Catching The Blue Train

These poems would be impossible before the age we’re in. A great scramble of space-age, electronic-age, solar-drive pieces of consciousness careens through these pages. It’s a Now book, but carrying with it a fragmented tide of nostalgia.

For in our time the gears are catching the flesh, and Ron Ellis is there to record and reflect, to see the picture and nail it before us. He rattles our memories while confronting us with the violence of something not yet formed but looming from our future. Even the titles can demonstrate the mix: “Alas, Poor Buick,” “Edward the Teller.” The author confesses, “I sift through artifacts of news and sports.” He juggles bits from The National Inquirer and—presto—we have a jewel of comprehension; we see what gulfs of emotion, what appetites for secular salvation lurk in those headlines.

In these poems you “tune in to Yangbusters”; you learn a modern legend, “The Welder’s Girl,” you witness the scientists’ embarassment that “ninety-seven per cent of the mass of the universe is missing.” But even while the bizarre and the grotesque parade by there are the close, vivid farm scenes, the work scenes (“Sand-blasting”). The whole world sweeps in, with all its near and everyday “Scenes of Green Light” immediacy; and yet—catching our breath—we get the far vision of a driven society, and the Ellis treatment again—the high-tech reassurance, our “pilots glowing with morale.”

Finally, with the immanence in poems like “Dead Air” and “Canto 65.” a quality just beneath the surface, “ready for a touch” (“Canto 52”), we get a hint of what the lady in the blue train might be bringing. This first volume, wide-ranging and fresh in its energy, tempts us to look forward to Ron Ellis’ next.

—William Stafford