I write academic features for the publishing industry’s hymnal: Publishers Weekly.
After researching and reading his body of literature, including novels, short story and poetry collections, even the films adapted from his work, I spoke with author Ron Rash and wrote this piece on his work for Publisher’s Weekly.
Excerpt:
As exhibited in Eureka Mill and other collections, his finely honed craftsmanship is most salient in his poetry, which has a casual, addictive appeal. Often compared to Seamus Heaney, the association is especially apt considering the Celtic musical, oral, and folkways ties running deeply through the Appalachians. Palimpsest and layered possession are intrinsic realities for rural North Carolinians. Plowing a field in “The Vanquished” from this year’s Poems: New and Selected turns up “pottery and arrowheads/ bone-shards that spilled across rows/ like kindling, a once-presence/ keen as the light of dead stars.”
By situating himself as the faithful observer of the natural world, Rash makes land, and landscape, available to readers. His dramatizations aren’t driven by sentimentality, but rather complex dilemmas usually centered on a question of land exploitation, or the exploitation of former land-workers, like those stuck in North Carolina’s Eureka Mill, fleeced of their land and sense of purpose. With his latest novel, Rash again creates an irresistible conceit that transcends the South. But, of course, the importance of the South is undeniable.