Southern Messenger Poets

Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith’s new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book’s forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author’s friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.