Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Poems: New and Selected
    Poems: New and Selected
    Poems: New and Selected
    Ebook182 pages1 hour

    Poems: New and Selected

    By Ron Rash

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A collection of haunting lyricism that evokes the beauty and hardship of the rural South, by a revered American master of letters—the award-winning, bestselling author of the novels Serena, Something Rich and Strange, and Above the Waterfall.

    In this incandescent, profound, and accessible collection, beloved and award-winning poet, novelist, and short-story writer Ron Rash vividly channels the rhythms of life in Appalachia, deftly capturing the panoply of individuals who are its heart and soul—men and women inured to misfortune and hard times yet defined by tremendous fortitude, resilience, and a fierce sense of community.

    In precise, supple language that swerves from the stark to the luminous, Rash richly describes the splendor of the natural landscape and poignantly renders the lives of those dependent on its bounty—in cotton mills and tobacco fields, farmlands and forests. The haunting memories and shared histories of these people—their rituals and traditions—animate this land, and are celebrated in Rash’s crystalline, intensely imagined verse.

    With an eye for the surprising and vivid detail, Ron Rash powerfully captures the sorrows and exaltations of this wondrous world he knows intimately. Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates his rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9780062435538
    Poems: New and Selected
    Author

    Ron Rash

    Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

    Read more from Ron Rash

    Related to Poems

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Prophet of Nothingness

      Sep 12, 2021

      The Prophet of Nothingness
      9 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Time Is Now

      Aug 18, 2021

      Suggested Reading: What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August) by Alice McDermott The author of eight novels, three of which were named Pulitzer Prize finalists, including Charming Billy, which won the

      2 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2019

      Sep 5, 2019

      Eight new and notable collections you want on your nightstand this month, including work by a lost Catalan master and the latest from our new poet laureate. The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Jericho Rising

      Jan 13, 2020

      Jericho Rising
      11 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      On Mary Oliver and Resisting Poems of Gladness

      Jan 22, 2019

      Was it possible that, despite my best efforts to resist proscriptive poetry doctrines, somewhere along the line I’d internalized the unspoken tenet that accessible poems of praise and wonder are less worthy of real attention? The post On Mary Oliver

      5 min read

    • Article

      Unafraid Of The Dark

      Mar 27, 2018

      SOME YEARS AGO, in a workshop, I wrote about my sister’s self-destructive adolescence. I recounted her recklessness with boys and alcohol, the anger that erupted like a geyser inside her, and her hell-bent desire to run away—which she did by joining

      10 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: Nevertheless, Live

      Aug 16, 2018

      Poetry Rx: Nevertheless, Live
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Poems

    4/5

    6 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Poems - Ron Rash

      Dedication

      For family

      Epigraph

      "I had my existence. I was there.

      Me in place and the place in me."

      —Seamus Heaney, A Herbal

      Contents

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Resolution

      RAISING THE DEAD

      Last Service

      Under Jocassee

      Taking Down the Lines

      Fall Creek

      Shee-Show

      Deep Water

      In Dismal Gorge

      Black-Eyed Susans

      Whippoorwill

      Shelton Laurel

      Wolf Laurel

      Speckled Trout

      In the Barn

      Barn Burning: 1967

      Work, for the Night Is Coming

      The Debt

      Watauga County: 1974

      Burning the Field

      At Reid Hartley’s Junkyard

      Spear Point

      Kephart in the Smokies

      Barbed Wire

      The Search

      Brightleaf

      At Leicester Cemetery

      Madison County, June 1999

      The Wolves in the Asheville Zoo

      The Watch

      Bartram Leaves Jocassee

      Carolina Parakeet

      The Vanquished

      A Homestead on the Horsepasture

      Bottomland

      Tremor

      Analepsis

      The Day the Gates Closed

      Beyond the Dock

      The Men Who Raised the Dead

      AMONG THE BELIEVERS

      On the Border

      Plowing on Moonlight

      The Corpse Bird

      Madison County: 1864

      On the Watauga

      Before

      The Exchange

      A Preacher Who Takes Up Serpents Laments the Presence of Skeptics in His Church

      The Afflicted

      The Preacher Is Called to Testify for the Accused

      Signs

      Animal Hides

      The Ascent

      From The Mabinogion

      In a Springhouse at Night

      Blue River

      Spring Lizards

      Watershed

      Ginseng

      Lasting Water

      Passage

      Barn Loft: 1959

      The Fox

      August 1959: Morning Service

      Abandoned Homestead in Watauga County

      Among the Believers

      Good Friday 1995, Driving Westward

      EUREKA MILL

      Invocation

      Eureka

      In a Dry Time

      Mill Village

      Low Water

      Spring Fever

      Accident

      The Sweeper

      The Famous Photographer Visits Eureka

      Bearings

      Jokes

      The Stretch-Out

      Flying Squadron

      The Ballad of Ella Mae Wiggins

      1934

      Black and White

      Boundaries

      Revenant

      Brown Lung

      Plane Crash

      Listening to WBT

      Last Interview

      First Shift

      Photograph of My Parents Outside Eureka Cotton Mill. Dated June 1950

      July 1949

      WAKING

      First Memory

      The Trout in the Springhouse

      Milking Traces

      Sleepwalking

      Junk Car in Snow

      Time Flow

      Watauga County: 1959

      Bonding Fire

      Pocketknives

      Shadetree

      Car Tags

      Spillcorn

      Emrys

      Mirror

      Woman Among Lightning: Catawba County Fair, 1962

      Bloodroot

      The Reaping

      Elegy for Merle Watson

      White Wings

      Resonance

      Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out

      Genealogy

      The Code

      The Crossing

      The Pact

      Good Friday 2006: Shelton Laurel

      Reading the Leaves

      Boy in a Boxcar

      Pentecost

      Watauga County: 1962

      Price Lake

      NEW POEMS

      Wet Moon

      Accent

      The Country Singer Explains Her Muse

      Weasel

      Tracks

      Moody Spring

      The Call

      Direction

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Also by Ron Rash

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      RESOLUTION

      The surge and clatter of whitewater conceals

      how shallow underneath is, how quickly gone.

      Leave that noise behind. Come here

      where the water is slow, and clear.

      Watch the crawfish prance across the sand,

      the mica flash, the sculpin blend with stone.

      It’s all beyond your reach though it appears

      as near and known as your outstretched hand.

      RAISING THE DEAD

      LAST SERVICE

      Though cranes and bulldozers came,

      yanked free marble and creek stones

      like loose teeth, and then shovels

      unearthed coffins and Christ’s

      stained glass face no longer paned

      windows but like the steeple,

      piano, bell, and hymnals

      followed that rolling graveyard

      over the quick-dying streams,

      the soon obsolete bridges—

      they still congregated there,

      wading then crossing in boats

      those last Sunday nights, their farms

      already lost in the lake,

      nothing but that brief island

      left of their world as they lit

      the church with candles and sang

      from memory deep as water

      old hymns of resurrection

      before leaving that high ground

      where the dead had once risen.

      UNDER JOCASSEE

      One summer morning when

      the sky is blue and deep

      as the middle of the lake,

      rent a boat and shadow

      Jocassee’s western shoreline

      until you reach the cove that

      once was the Horsepasture River.

      Now bow your head and soon

      you’ll see as through a mirror

      not a river but a road

      flowing underneath you.

      Follow that road into

      the deeper water where

      you’ll pass a family graveyard,

      then a house and barn.

      All that’s changed is time,

      so cut the motor and drift

      back sixty years and remember

      a woman who lived in that house,

      remember an August morning

      as she walks from the barn,

      the milking done, a woman

      singing only to herself,

      no children yet, her husband

      distant in the field.

      Suddenly she shivers,

      something dark has come

      over her although

      no cloud shades the sun.

      She’s no longer singing.

      She believes someone

      has crossed her grave, although

      she will go to her grave,

      a grave you’ve just passed over,

      wondering why she looked up.

      TAKING DOWN THE LINES

      They tore the telephone lines

      from the valley like unhealed

      stitches, poles and wires hauled off

      through which voices had once flowed

      across Jocassee like freshets

      crisscrossing, running backward

      into far coves where one phone

      might be shared by five families.

      In those lines was sediment

      of births and sickness, deaths,

      love vows and threats, all passed on

      mouth to mouth, vital as breath

      before silenced in the lake’s

      currents of lost connections.

      FALL CREEK

      As though shedding an old skin,

      Fall Creek slips free from fall’s weight,

      clots of leaves blackening snags,

      back of pool where years ago

      local lore claims clothes were shed

      by a man and woman wed

      less than a month, who let hoe

      and plow handle slip from hands,

      left rows half done, crossed dark waves

      of bottomland to lie on

      a bed of ferns, make a child,

      and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1