Moon Road

Book excerpt: 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.