The Blurring of Time
Ronald Moran ’58
Clemson University Digital Press (2007)

Moran’s new poems—about ordinary people at a fair in Berlin, a sports bar, a car dealership—are less ironic and more contemplative than the poetry in his previous eight collections. First-person voices aim high: one speaker shoots BBs into “a stand of fall colors ... the first of my irrational flights/to a wood I could never enter.” Something skews—a reflection in a store window, spilled tic tacs—and the poems “roam like an errant spotlight” recovering moments blurred by time.

In his first encounter with a stripper, recalls a voice from the vantage of advancing years, she knocked his “dark lenses/nearly out of their frame/and me with them./Whatever they call days like that,/they come rare.” Here is rare connectedness and metaphors that speak precisely, “like snowflakes, like droplets, like the clear voice of the world.”