Customer Reviews

Among the Believers

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...in Rash's talent, that is. AMONG THE BELIEVERS is a modestly scaled collection of poems that packs a wallop. The power comes from the seeming effortlessness of Rash's rhythms and images in poems set among the "everyday" folk of the Carolina Appalachians who, in their struggles with life, love, redemption, and death, turn out to be something more than ordinary. Here the poet is storyteller, bard, confessor, recorder, and lover of these people. His reverence for them shows in his refusal ever to condescend and with the fresh-eyed wonder and beauty with which he renders the world they live in.

The late Anthony Hecht provides a kind and insightful foreward to the poem and never hyperbolizes the merits of Rash's writing. This collection may very well establish itself as a classic.

This is a collection of beautiful lyric poems by a poet with a mastery of form and language. I was bowled over by his first collection (Eureka Mill) and while this volume may not be as overpowering as a whole, the individual poems stay with you in the same manner as those of Robert Frost or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The sensory images are especially beautiful. There are countless lines and phrases that call up not just pictures or sounds or smells, but deep and deeply felt emotions and states of mind: "overalls and hat/scarecrowing a bedpost" (from "Plowing on Moonlight"); "the rattlesnakes that swayed among the branches/were only limbs away from gaining heaven" (from "Flood"); "Two boulders squeezed the creek/to a slick white rush" (from "Ginseng")--there are literally hundreds of such expert expressions. I find myself calling friends on the phone to read them poems, taking the collection into the office and sharing them with co-workers.

I think Rash's two collections are the first shouts from a really promising poet. I think this guy has staying power.

Rash's love of family and simpler times are vividly evident in his writings. His narrative and evocative language mentally sketch the reader into the center of each setting. It is easy to envision the events, thoughts, and feelings that inspired Rash to capture that partiular moment and preserve it in his words. This book is a "must read" for poet lovers and non poet lovers alike.

Emotional depth and mastery of form are certainly hallmarks of this latest book of poems by Ron Rash. AMONG THE BELIEVERS is a collection of narrative poetry that has as its heart life in the rural mountain areas of western North Carolina.

Because of the attention given to form and a rhythm that is generated by a deft scattering of alliteration, slant and internal rhyme, ATB is at once a poet's poetry. But the reader who reads for content only will be rewarded as well by the questions asked and answered by these poems.

ATB is broken into five parts which either cover different themes or provide alternative perspectives on the material. For instance, Part IV all directly concerns the poet's own life, no personas. Part II is enlivened by first and third person personas that speak largely on the religious theme of the book.

But there are many kinds of believers in this book, religious worshippers, farmers who look for signs, and even a man who must believe his own encounter with a catamount that scientists have proven nonexistent in the area.

Do yourself a favor and pick this one up; there is no doubting this man's ability.

I haven't read it all but am very impressed by this writing. Ron Rash is a new discovery for me.

If you have never read Ron Rash, do yourself a favor and do so. One of the great modern southern poetry and fiction writers, not as distanced as MacCarthy, nor as Verbose as Leslie.
His use of faith is quite appropriate, and he does not shove it down your throat, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions, evenwhile a rock solid old-time faith of fallen men infuses and sustains his narritive.

A great, great read and fine book of poems,one of the best I have read in years, and after reading Chemistry and other short stories, I cant wait to read him again.

If you love poetry and don't have this one, then you're missing the best collection to come out in years. This book should have won the Pulitzer for poetry. Enough said. It's stunning, beautiful, wonderful. And Ron Rash didn't even pay me to say that.