A Variable Sense of Things

The teacher assigns her fourth-grade students to write "poems as lovely as trees," and they go at it, these students whose aspirations are a display board at the county fair. Young Ron McFarland takes the subject to heart, and from his pencil unfurl leaves, sturdy branches, sunlight between the branches, possibly fruit and a wayward kite, and most certainly a nest in which birds burst with song. McFarland, in this and previous collections, goes far beyond trees. I see McFarland coloring the world, a sort of John Constable, beginning with trees and then with tenderness and art making it all come alive.

- Gary Soto, author of New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award Finalist, and One Kind of Faith

If you were to sit down with Ron McFarland (kitchen counter, seminar table, barstool), you would soon understand that he knows a very great deal about a whole lot of things and can talk about any of them with savvy and erudition, mostly disguised as plain talk. The experience is not a whole lot different from reading A Variable Sense of Things, his latest book of poems. Sometimes wry, sometimes downright funny; sometimes elegiac, sad, or rueful, and always, always smart. They do not strain, these poems. They are wise. They mean exactly what they say, and more.

- Robert Wrigley, author of Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems and The True Account of Myself As A Bird

Intensely personal poems, studded with unexpected ironies like grace notes, which illuminate the depth below the surface.

- Mary Clearman Blew, author of Think of Horses