Under the Pearl Moon: poems

The gorgeous poems in Under the Pearl Moon are accompanied by interludes of evocative memoir, where we travel with Rick 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.

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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. Maxon's work has also appeared on The Poetry Foundation's The Slowdown podcast.

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"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. 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 O: Love Poems from the Ozarks

"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 Read a Poem and How to Write a Form Poem

"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

"In Under the Pearl Moon, Richard 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

"In this rich collection, lyrical prose adds historical and geographic context to 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, author of No Such Thing as Distance