Plums are not the only fruit that grows in this orchard of deftly crafted and sagely insightful new poems from Arkansas poet Gerry Sloan. There are also wild grapes, mulberries, and watermelons thumped for ripeness. Like those plums “plucked from the fencerow / on Decoration Day,” they all flourish on trees, bushes, and vines that in the landscape of the poet’s imagination line the boundary between past and present, the living and the dead, innocence and experience, what we have lost and what we can still become. In Cemetery Plums, Sloan proves once again that he is a master at finding the greatest truths in life’s simplest experiences and at discovering in the natural world the metaphors we live by. —Michael Blanchard, author, The Things of This World and editor, SLANT A retired music professor and lifelong poet, Gerry Sloan instinctively grants his poetry perspective and music. Riffing through time and experience and emotion, Sloan examines the lives we lead and breathes melody and rhythm into this existence, while deftly sounding the notes of integrity, hope, and compassion. —Phillip Howerton, author, The History of Tree Roots and Gods of Four Mile Creek Gerry Sloan’s Cemetery Plums awakens us to everything we’re prone to overlook, whether a spider swinging “on a single sparkling strand of gossamer” or a dream that would speak to us if we’d only listen — and Sloan is always listening, with all of his senses. I adore his wit, self-effacing, dry, ironic, and feel his melancholy, rooted in an acute sense of mortality. You will find, too, in these brilliant yet companionable poems, Sloan’s deep, vulnerable love for earth and kin. In “Searching for Muscadines,” he writes, “If you should someday find me wandering / distractedly by a rural fencerow, please / think of this poem and know I haven’t / entirely lost my mind, Dad still out there / somewhere, guiding me to the ripest ones.” —Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Arkansas Poet Laureate and author, The Perfume of Pain
