Moon Road: Poems, 1986-2005 - Paperback

by Ron Smith (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Ron Smith was Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2014 to 2016. He holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching and serves as Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia, where he has also been an adjunct associate professor at the University of Richmond. Smith is the author of these poetry collections: Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (1988, second edition 2020), Moon Road (2007), Its Ghostly Workshop (2013), and The Humility of the Brutes (2017).