Ted Olson's poetry chapbook, Blue Moon, continues this East Tennessee-based author's longtime celebration of Appalachian life and landscapes. His writings explore a range of topics and places. His poems, articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, reviews, and oral histories have appeared in a wide variety of books and periodicals. His poems are connected by the poet's assessment of the quotidian realities experienced in a particular time (the turbulent decade leading up to the 2020 pandemic) and in a beloved but misunderstood region (Appalachia). Olson's earlier poetry displayed a facility with sound, form, and understatement, and the poems in Blue Moon continue that approach, interweaving musical phrasing, subtle rhyming, taut stanzaic structures, and elliptical presentation of details. On the surface these 29 poems relate anecdotes from daily life in contemporary Appalachia, but the poems' ultimate aspiration is to transport readers beyond reflection on lived experiences to a state of awareness regarding the universality of those experiences. A blue moon is a rare astronomical phenomenon with (according to folklore) the power to imbue a sense of mystery in the everyday lives of people. The poems in Ted Olson's Blue Moon have the power to conjure up memorable flashes of mystery and meaning.
Ted Olson has lived for many years in Appalachia, where he has worked as a naturalist, a park ranger, and a professor. His poems, articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, reviews, and oral histories have appeared in a wide variety of books and periodicals. Olson's poetry collections include Breathing in Darkness: Poems (2006) and Revelations: Poems (2012). Among his other publications are several scholarly books, including Blue Ridge Folklife (1998), The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music (2005), and A Tennessee Folklore Sampler (2009). He has edited books featuring literary works by James Still, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, and Cesare Pavese. Book series editor for the University of Tennessee Press's Charles K. Wolfe Music Series as well as associate editor and music section editor for the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Olson is a Grammy-nominated record producer and album notes writer. Presently Professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, he served in 2008 as Fulbright Senior Scholar of American Studies in Barcelona, Spain.
