Raymond Berthelot
On Sunday, June 12, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome Raymond Berthelot. Raymond Berthelot is the Parks Program Manager for the Louisiana Office of State Parks and teaches history with Baton Rouge Community College. His work has appeared in journals as diverse as Apricity Magazine, The Elevation Review, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, the Carolina Quarterly and DASH Literary Journal. His chapbook of poems, The Middle Ages, is published by Finishing Line Press.
As with all Sundays@4 presentations, this event is free and open for all to enjoy.
Cover of The Middle Ages, image by Ron Bennett
Though this is Ray Berthelot’s first book, it does not read that way. He has a practiced hand. Berthelot works the same way that Miles Davis shaped his solos to let the bare bones of song lines emerge. He knows what to put in and what to leave out, how to let the poem tell its own story. In The Middle Ages Ray Berthelot shows measures of verve, clarity and grace that not all writers ever learn to give the reader.
- Ed Ruzicka, author of My Life in Cars and Engines of BeliefThe Middle Ages is, put frankly, good poetry from Mr. Berthelot. The poems are very deep and move along loving lines. This is sincere, clean and conscious poetry, sometimes humble and innocent, but always honest and warm, supportive and forceful.
- Marco Tulio del Arca, Honduran poet and author of On the Walls of a Dream and Under the Sun of All