Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.
Ron Smith was poet laureate of Virginia from 2014 to 2016. He is the author of five poetry collections: Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, The Humility of the Brutes, and That Beauty in the Trees. Smith currently serves as writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
"There certainly is beauty in the trees, in every branch, leaf, and root. You have invested it all in these enriching poems: artistic mastery, intellectual substance, tender heartache, authentic imagination, complexity and paradox of emotion, comfort, admirable vulnerability, musicality of phrasing, exquisite timing, material that matters, a humble voice that comes to visit."--Jack Ridl "In Smith's eyes, ears, and vision, a poem has a very good chance of finding out just how good it can be."--Cornelius Eady "Smith grapples with history as it verges into myth, in poems that rerender the recent and distant past with rigor and vision."--David Groff "Whether in the shadow of the towers' forever falling, the confounding Deep South, or his young sharpshooter father drawing straws on Guadalcanal, Ron Smith encounters the sublime in memory, the wry, and the profane in his new collection."--Linda Parsons "That Beauty in the Trees is a magnificent collection. The title poem, which slays me, is but one of many excruciating moments rendered with aching clarity and revelation. The book is a gift and a wonder."--Irene Ziegler is the author of Rules of the Lake and Ashes to Water "That Beauty in the Trees ignites one's passions again and again with inspired plainsong exploding abruptly into poetry. Smith's range sprawls over many visions and testimonies of antiquity, memory, and moral declaration."--Ron Powers
