Southern Messenger Poets

The title of Ron Smith’s new collection comes from Yeats’s observation that creators “must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes.” The poems in The Humility of the Brutes move beyond Yeats’s journey, using precise language and memorable phrasing to push through skepticism and guide us toward the mystical as we struggle to understand our past and our present.