Rob Searls
Ron Searls’ poems have been published in The Lyric Magazine, Verse Virtual, and by Indolent Books’ online project “HIV Here and Now.” He is a recently retired software engineer. Before he retired, he remembered that he hadn’t graduated from MIT, re-enrolled, and finished with the class of 2015. He has won Lyric Magazines’ New England Prize. Founded in 1921, The Lyric is the oldest magazine in North America in continuous publication devoted to traditional poetry.
“He guides us through history, looking down at an artist thumbing the clay of words, the longing of a lost cello, the lost rulers and old gods.”
"Not a book to race through but rather one to savor, Ron Searls’ Trees of Life and Shade includes both formal and free verse poems about trees, yes, but also poems about the Internet, volcanoes, cancer and T-cell counts, a Chinese pillow, Chopin, a dreaming cello, a puppet like a poem, myth, indeed the whole wild cosmos spinning with ants and termites to stars and planets. The collection is music in both subject and sound. 'Holographic cities pulse on the skins of brown onions.' I think of Baudelaire or maybe Walt Whitman on a cosmic scale."
-Elizabeth Bodien, author of Blood, Metal, Fiber, Rock and Oblique Music: A Book of Hours, and the forthcoming Journeys with Fortune
"Ron Searls, in his art as in his life, bridges the gulf C. P. Snow warned of between the culture of science and of literature."
–Mark Pawlak, author of Reconnaissance, New and Selected Poems
"As few others are, these poems are intent on the recovery from past concealments of self—encounters which bring us face to face with the full wonders he’s coaxed from nocturnes, seasons, aubades, laments, exotic cafes, Mnemosyne, herself, cancer and even the internet."
–G. E. Schwartz, author of Only Others Are, World, and Thinking in Tongues
"In Searls’ vision the convergence of the metaphysical with the materiality of the everyday produces striking results."
–Laura Johanna Braverman, author of Salt Water (forthcoming)
