Advance Praise for
Sense of Direction
How do you live with the dead?-through memory and small gardens of elegiac goodbyes. From Ezra Pound to Sappho to
King Lear
to John Prine, these beautiful poems ask the question: "Why go through all of this wonder alone?" Rob Merritt teaches us, in the most tender and thoughtful ways, what he's learned from living.
-
William Walsh
, author of
Lakewood
and
Fly Fishing in Times Square
In his personal
Desiderata
, Rob Merritt leads us through love, loss, and light and the lessons gleaned in between. "Do the best with your years," he encourages us in his wise, bighearted collection,
. Through his wandering and wondering about the mystery of it all, he invites us to leave the guidebook behind to see how beautiful the world really is.
Linda Parsons
Valediction: Poems and Prose.
Rob Merritt's collection of poems,
Sense of Direction,
unravels with elegies and visitations. This engaging collection mines the unexplainable. Merritt populates poetry that includes famous writers, poets, artists, and others. He's not afraid to explore deeply, whether through the style of long lines or short lines.
urges us to contemplate, imagine, and probe. Let's travel with this poet.
Lenard D. Moore
The Geography of Jazz
Long Rain
In his newest work of poetry,
Rob Merritt returns to a reconfiguration of home. In this setting, the reader is invited to share the lonely trails of Appalachia, the gravesites of relatives, their relatives, and long evenings when romance is making up its mind and memories once again; home, where local bourbons and clear boundaries mix themselves uncertainly into the night.
Like Odysseus's nostos to Ithaca, the author has returned home as if for the first time, where each of us found our first place, a place of endless rebirth; a homeland.
Robert Borcykowski
This Side of the Promised Land.
About the Author
Rob Merritt is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Bluefield University.
Born in North Carolina, he lives in the mountains of West Virginia. He has published the poetry collections
View from Blue-Jade Mountain
(Finishing Line Press),
The Language of Longing
(Old Seventy Creek Press), Landscape Architects (Pudding House Press), and the critical book
Early Music and the Aesthetics of Ezra Pound
.
His poetry and essays have appeared in
The North American Review
,
Kestrel
Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel,
Psaltery & Lyre
The James Dickey Review
The Asheville Poetry Review
, among other journals, and the collections
The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina
;
Wild Sweet Notes II: Contemporary West Virginia Writers;
Coal: An Anthology.
Merritt has taught poetry in China and has been drawn to the work of Chinese Rivers and Mountain poets.
He is on the eternal search for home.