A Variable Sense of Things

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The teacher assigns her fourth-grade students to write "poems as lovely as trees, " and they go at it, these students whose aspirations are a display board at the county fair. Young Ron McFarland takes the subject to heart, and from his pencil unfurl leaves, sturdy branches, sunlight between the branches, possibly fruit and a wayward kite, and most certainly a nest in which birds burst with song. McFarland, in this and previous collections, goes far beyond trees. I see McFarland coloring the world, a sort of John Constable, beginning with trees and then with tenderness and art making it all come alive. - Gary Soto, author of New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award Finalist, and One Kind of Faith If you were to sit down with Ron McFarland (kitchen counter, seminar table, barstool), you would soon understand that he knows a very great deal about a whole lot of things and can talk about any of them with savvy and erudition, mostly disguised as plain talk. The experience is not a whole lot different from reading A Variable Sense of Things, his latest book of poems. Sometimes wry, sometimes downright funny, sometimes elegiac, sad, or rueful, and always, always smart. They do not strain, these poems. They are wise. They mean exactly what they say, and more. - Robert Wrigley, author of Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems and The True Account of Myself As A Bird Intensely personal poems, studded with unexpected ironies like grace notes, which illuminate the depth below the surface. - Mary Clearman Blew, author of Think of Horses