Under the Pearl Moon: Poems Description

These gorgeous poems are accompanied by interludes of memoir, where we travel with poet Rick Maxson from Ohio to Spain, California to Carolina, Texas to Florida—and more. (Maxson has moved more times than you can count, and with each move he’s brought poetry forward to this crowning moment.)

A lifetime of experience, gathered into a luminous book of poems, Under the Pearl Moon takes you into the arms of love, wisdom, nature—and, of course, a glorious share of pearls and the moon.

Words from Others

“I absolutely love this book. Under the Pearl Moon is more than a collection of masterful poems; it is a chronicle of a well-lived life. Weaving prose pieces with poetry, Rick Maxson skillfully creates a rich personal mythology of geography and memory—from the 1950s to present day, from growing up in a Craftsman home in Columbus, Ohio, to adult life in rural romantic North Carolina, and then on to Florida, where he discovers the love of his life. His paradise may in fact be along North Carolina’s Eno River where he would ‘so quietly live / among the particles of light and air,’ and yet his poem, ‘Tree Frog,’ encapsulates the compelling, grand theme of the collection: ‘You make me remember…the mysteries of the world…as I stumble in darkness with open eyes.’”

—Dave Malone, author of eight poetry collections, including O: Love Poems from the Ozarks and Tornado Drill

“Rick Maxson’s poems—interspersed with brief personal essays bridging the geographical and psychic residencies of his life—sing with birds living inside a Home Depot, scintillate with ‘solder stars’ from a father’s glass workshop, and stick to our fingers like the powdery binding of a decaying book of fairy tales. In the sensory intricacies of Maxson’s language, we find a poetry so personal, so singularly woven with the memories of a life lived reflectively, that we can’t help but find our own stories in the pages. Reading these poems is like basking in shared moonlight.”

—Tania Runyan, author of How to Write a Poem, How to Read a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem

“‘No place is a place until it’s found its poet,’ said Wallace Stegner, and in Under the Pearl Moon, Rick Maxson brings several places into their fullness, exploring them through memory,
relationship, rejection, and layer on layer of wonder and questioning. These poems, each with jewel-like detail, help to tell a story of longing, leaving, return, and promise.”

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey

“You can read this utterly charming book of poems for its lifetime of places—Ohio, Spain, California, Colorado, Texas, North Carolina—even though the poet says there may be ‘nothing there, only reasons to leave.’ You can see the world through the eyes of a boy ‘living in mystery fashioned by hapless adults,’ where one might think, ‘There is no one here that knows me.’ You can also read Under the Pearl Moon as a paean to friends and family—a father who made windows, a mother ‘who seemed to get whatever she wanted,’ an uncle, sister, lover like ‘shells found along the sand.’ Or you can just ponder all the memorable lines and images along the way: ‘Shoes with winter in their folds,’ a refrigerator ‘as close to food as words can come,’ the sound of a tree frog that ‘fills the sad spaces left by the owl and loon.’ Whatever way you read this personable, thoughtful book, you will find, as the poet says, ‘everything stringed and vibrant, singing.’”

—Jack Cooper, author of Across My Silence

“In lines full of music and pleasure and longing, Rick Maxson plots the rivers of his life, offering glimpses of love and hardship, of the working-class neighborhood where he spent his boyhood, of his travels and travails, his parents’ desires and desperation, and his own path into a life rich with change. By making art of memory, he reminds us that we are ‘sounds living for a moment, each one / disappearing into the next, / then each one gone.’”

—Todd Davis, author of Native Species
 
“This rich collection marries memoir and poetry as Maxson seeks to understand the story of his life. Lyrical prose separates the sections, adding historical and geographic context to the reflective poems that follow. Moving across the U.S. and overseas proved traumatic and exciting to both the young and adult Maxson, and those experiences inform his writing. I especially enjoyed poems about his wife: ‘I wait for the slender purl of your voice,’ and about his father: ‘the beautiful energy of waves / breaking themselves over rocks into pools, / a larger love learned by loving.’”

—Karen Paul Holmes, winner of the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and author of No Such Thing as Distance

The Collection’s Preface Poem

Eno

Let it be the river Eno—
as if the map of where is wind,
it buckles in the autumn trees and grasses.
Back bent on a lift of limb
I twist, as sap drops like alluvium scattered
on steep slopes, where water weakened in its course.
I would so quietly live
among the particles of light and air, a hue
ubiquitously hiding along guiding banks of green,
garden, rake, and furrow,
yellow aging tear-shape falling,
wet and taken, leaf and ribbon…

—Rick Maxson, in Under the Pearl Moon: Poems

About the Poet

Rick Maxson is the Every Day Poems permissions editor and a contributor at Tweetspeak Poetry. His poems have been published in Tania Runyan’s How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry” and How to Write a Form Poem: A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Forms, as well as in Sara Barkat’s Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience. Maxson’s work has also appeared on The Poetry Foundation’s The Slowdown podcast.