Sense of Direction

Advance Praise for Sense of Direction

How do you live with the dead?—through memory and small gardens of elegiac goodbyes. From Ezra Pound to Sappho to King Lear to John Prine, these beautiful poems ask the question: “Why go through all of this wonder alone?” Rob Merritt teaches us, in the most tender and thoughtful ways, what he’s learned from living.

– William Walsh, author of Lakewood and Fly Fishing in Times Square

In his personal Desiderata, Rob Merritt leads us through love, loss, and light and the lessons gleaned in between. “Do the best with your years,” he encourages us in his wise, bighearted collection, Sense of Direction. Through his wandering and wondering about the mystery of it all, he invites us to leave the guidebook behind to see how beautiful the world really is.

– Linda Parsons, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose.

Rob Merritt’s collection of poems, Sense of Direction, unravels with elegies and visitations. This engaging collection mines the unexplainable. Merritt populates poetry that includes famous writers, poets, artists, and others. He’s not afraid to explore deeply, whether through the style of long lines or short lines. Sense of Direction urges us to contemplate, imagine, and probe. Let’s travel with this poet.

– Lenard D. Moore, author of The Geography of Jazz and Long Rain

In his newest work of poetry, Sense of Direction, Rob Merritt returns to a reconfiguration of home. In this setting, the reader is invited to share the lonely trails of Appalachia, the gravesites of relatives, their relatives, and long evenings when romance is making up its mind and memories once again; home, where local bourbons and clear boundaries mix themselves uncertainly into the night.

Like Odysseus’s nostos to Ithaca, the author has returned home as if for the first time, where each of us found our first place, a place of endless rebirth; a homeland.

– Robert Borcykowski, author of This Side of the Promised Land.

About the Author

Rob Merritt is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Bluefield University.

Born in North Carolina, he lives in the mountains of West Virginia. He has published the poetry collections View from Blue-Jade Mountain (Finishing Line Press), The Language of Longing (Old Seventy Creek Press), Landscape Architects (Pudding House Press), and the critical book Early Music and the Aesthetics of Ezra Pound.

His poetry and essays have appeared in The North American Review, Kestrel, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Psaltery & Lyre, The James Dickey Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, among other journals, and the collections The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina; Wild Sweet Notes II: Contemporary West Virginia Writers; and Coal: An Anthology.

Merritt has taught poetry in China and has been drawn to the work of Chinese Rivers and Mountain poets.

He is on the eternal search for home.