|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Everything's out of its true element in Ronald Moran '58's chapbook of poems, Fish Out of Water—everybody's in the wrong war, the wrong time, the wrong life. In the title poem, a carp dies in a pool of water recycled from air conditioners. In "Renegade," a lone wolf who's only trying to make a living is trapped by a rancher and euthanized. This small collection of 17 narrative poems offers classic stuff in miniature: characters in conflict with their environment, their times or themselves. Moran's poems are crafted out of glimpses of the American scene or recalled from the past with perfect clarity. Details and metaphors wryly understate emotion. One speaker, remembering crossing a Grange Hall dance floor as if it were a mine field between himself and a girl, also remembers that he "would fix on her like the North Star." Scary as it was, he knew where he was headed, and everything held promise. The speaker in "Riding It Out" buys a new motorcycle every spring. "When it throbs/beneath me, promising, I put on my/gloves, drop the visor of my helmet/into place," he says, like a knight girding for battle, then delivers deadpan an admission of perpetual unreadiness and resignation: "With my hand and foot/I feel for the clutch and gears./Where is the clutch? How does it work?" How to handle this life that is always so full of promise‹and always includes the promise of letdown or defeat? Fish Out of Water, which also might be taken as an imperative, says there's more than one way to be a fish out of water, so aim high and deep. In "For You," Moran writes, "You can only wait the best way you know/for the right time, when all signs say Go:/the rainbow's brilliant leap into air,/the beaver's slick and calculated plunge." Moran recently retired as professor of English and associate dean at Clemson University. This is his fifth collection of poems. |
|
readers write | periscope | from the hill | student life | faculty file | books & authors mules on the move | gifts and grants | alumni at large | obituaries | final period
©1999 COLBY COLLEGE |
