
A Variable Sense of Things
Ron McFarland(Author)
Cirque Press
Published on 29. December 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
108 pages
978-1-7375104-8-2 (ISBN)
Description
The teacher assigns her fourth-grade students to write "poems as lovely as trees," and they go at it, these students whose aspirations are a display board at the county fair. Young Ron McFarland takes the subject to heart, and from his pencil unfurl leaves, sturdy branches, sunlight between the branches, possibly fruit and a wayward kite, and most certainly a nest in which birds burst with song. McFarland, in this and previous collections, goes far beyond trees. I see McFarland coloring the world, a sort of John Constable, beginning with trees and then with tenderness and art making it all come alive.
- Gary Soto, author of New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award Finalist, and One Kind of Faith
If you were to sit down with Ron McFarland (kitchen counter, seminar table, barstool), you would soon understand that he knows a very great deal about a whole lot of things and can talk about any of them with savvy and erudition, mostly disguised as plain talk. The experience is not a whole lot different from reading A Variable Sense of Things, his latest book of poems. Sometimes wry, sometimes downright funny; sometimes elegiac, sad, or rueful, and always, always smart. They do not strain, these poems. They are wise. They mean exactly what they say, and more.
- Robert Wrigley, author of Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems and The True Account of Myself As A Bird
Intensely personal poems, studded with unexpected ironies like grace notes, which illuminate the depth below the surface.
- Mary Clearman Blew, author of Think of Horses
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
170 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-7375104-8-2 (9781737510482)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ron McFarland, the author of more than 20 books, is a professor of English at the University of Idaho.