Description
Ted Olson’s poetry chapbook, Blue Moon, continues this East Tennessee-based author’s longtime celebration of Appalachian life and landscapes. His writings explore a range of topics and places. His poems are connected by the poet’s assessment of the quotidian realities experienced in a particular time (the turbulent decade leading up to the 2020 pandemic) and in a beloved but misunderstood region (Appalachia). Olson’s earlier poetry displayed a facility with sound, form, and understatement, and the poems in Blue Moon continue that approach, interweaving musical phrasing, subtle rhyming, taut stanzaic structures, and elliptical presentation of details. On the surface these 29 poems relate anecdotes from daily life in contemporary Appalachia, but the poems’ ultimate aspiration is to transport readers beyond reflection on lived experiences to a state of awareness regarding the universality of those experiences. A blue moon is a rare astronomical phenomenon with (according to folklore) the power to imbue a sense of mystery in the everyday lives of people. The poems in Ted Olson’s Blue Moon have the power to conjure up memorable flashes of mystery and meaning.
Praise for Blue Moon
Ted Olson’s poems find a way between menace and mystery, acknowledging the impact of the past on the present, and gifts of recognition in the lifelong search for a home. The poems celebrate discoveries of the extraordinary in unlikely places and moments, which are the heart of poetry.
—Robert Morgan,
Author of Dark Energy and Gap Creek
Ted Olson has accomplished so much in so many fields, not only in literary scholarship but also film and music, that we sometimes forget he is, as this new collection makes clear, an excellent poet. I particularly admire the musicality in these poems and the manner in which external events and objects become correlatives of emotional states. These poems have a surface clarity, but beneath that clarity are depths.
—Ron Rash,
Author of Serena and In the Valley
