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Moveable Darkness (Salmon Poetry)

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Our eyes are instruments of light that register darkness as absence of light. We never see darkness. We don't know for certain what it is. Shadows moving under the moon and shade growing from the ground in sunlight give the illusion that darkness moves. Even night appears to slide around the planet, but darkness never moves, only is moved, controlled by the position of light. Our bodies, filled with darkness, move darkness, give darkness a self. These poems tracking that movement, metaphorically and literally, search for the opposite of self, as light is the opposite of darkness.

Ron Houchin's poetry is well known from its publication in dozens of journals worldwide - from Poetry Ireland Review to Poetry Australia. He has read his poetry in the Irish Writers' Centre, the Galway Arts Centre, The Hemingway Days Festival in Key West, Florida, and the James Wright Poetry Festival in Ohio. He has received grants and fellowships from such agencies as the Ohio Arts Council and Eastern Washington University. He has also published two chapbooks, The Courage of Animals (1994) and The Falling Boy (1995) in the US. A regular visitor to Ireland, and participant in the Eastern Washington University Summer Writing Program at the Irish Writers' Centre, he has taught literature and creative writing in public schools and colleges in the US for the past 30 years. He has received a Writers' Digest Award, an Ohio Arts Council Grant and prizes in a number of contests including the 1999 Tessa Fenstermaker Poetry Prize. He was also nominated for Paterson and Pushcart Prizes in 1997. Ron has read his poetry in Ireland on many occasions, most recently at the 2001 Dublin Writers' Festival, when he was described by one reviewer as "one of the discoveries for which an audience can be grateful to a literary festival." His first collection Death and the River was published by Salmon in 1996.