| "In reading Ron Smith's new collection, I am reminded
of Horace's famous advice to his fellow poets: ‘Let
what thou work'st upon/Be simple quite throughout, and wholly
one.' The virtues of clarity and cohesion, of a lyric intelligence
that refuses to posture and a wit that refuses to pander—ones
which Ron Smith possesses in abundance—are not much
praised anymore, though they should be. Superbly but unobtrusively
crafted, and laden with a pathos that always seems hard-earned,
Moon Road is a book of real distinction."—David
Wojahn
From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary
voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca," Ron Smith's
Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the
more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports,
and travel. Domestic poems give way to poems of pilgrimage
and witness, to poems of literary homage and metaphysical
questioning. A mind nurtured in the mid-twentieth-century
Deep South drifts north and west and finally abroad, and sometimes
into visionary, mysterious pasts. With skeptical reverence,
the poems hunger for and dramatize a search for immanence
and transcendence. Many poems examine the fear of meaninglessness,
the griefs of separation and alienation, and the limits as
well as the powers of language.
A full moon disentangles
from the petroleum plant
as we pull out of the harbor,rocking like childhood
toward Ithaca. Jets bank in and out
of an airport I've never seen. The deck blooms backpacks,
sleeping bags, a few tents.
The ship shudders and turns, makes
straight for the moon. We're riding the moon road into a cave. We shake and shake our heads, but
it's still there, black tunnel
the moon mines paving our path with gold. We climb out of the wind,
into our bunks, you above,
me below, rocked to sleep, chaste,
sky sister, tide brother, light and dark, dark and light. From "Moon Road" published in Moon Roadby Ron Smith.
Copyright © 2007 by Ron Smith. All rights reserved.
A native of Savannah, Georgia, Ron Smith is the author of the poetry collection Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery. In 2005 he was an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry and is now a curator for that prize. His critical prose appears regularly in the Georgia Review, Blackbird, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia, where he also teaches courses in poetry at the University of Richmond.
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