Raising the Dead

Raising the Dead is Ron Rash's third book of poetry. The overall theme is loss, both the social loss from the disappearance of communities due to the external effects of technology, and the personal loss from the death of a family member. The book is divided into five sections with the first and last dealing with the social impacts of the flooding of the Jocassee Valley on the border of North and South Carolina.

As in his other books, Rash is very precise in his use of language, with the prosody being informed by Welsh forms. Many of the poems use a style of syllabic verse featuring seven- syllable lines with internal echos, but most readers will not notice the craftsmanship of these poems because they flow so naturally. There is great narrative intensity in these poems with short poems of short lines telling detailed and vivid stories.

Ron Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. He graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University. He now lives in Clemson, South Carolina, with his wife and two children. He teaches English at Tri-County Technical College, and he teaches poetry in the M.F.A. program at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 1987 his fiction won a General Electric Younger Writers Award, and in 1994 he was awarded an NEA Poetry Fellowship. He was awarded the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, Yale Review, Oxford American, New England Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah and Sewanee Review. He is the author of four previous books: The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties, both collections of stories, and Eureka Mill and Among the Believers, both collections of poetry.