Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Arkansas Poet Laureate

Beneath the quiet surfaces of Gerry Sloan’s poems there abides an intimate relationship with the natural world to which he is daily attuned, but notes of cynicism rippling through his words remind us of materialist forces ever threatening the bird, the fox, the pasture. But Sloan’s view of things is never naïve or sentimental. In “Little Song of Complicity” (Flyways, 10) he writes:

Fly, little bird.

The developers are taking

Your forest one tree at a time.

Fly, little bird.

I too have mortgaged your hill.

In “Layers” (The Wild Muse, 156), his vision goes beyond the suburban subdivision, recognizing that groups of people have replaced other groups, lands have changed hands, creatures ruled over other creatures, and so on, all the way back to the beginning of time. Sloan’s bent in most all his poems is philosophical.

As a musician and retired music professor, Sloan writes for the ear as well as the heart, and his poems rhyme, but seldom with end rhyme. His rhymes are internal, slant, and always subtle. His words are like musical notes, full of surprising sound correspondences, reminding me of Frost’s words: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” A good example is seen in “Petoskey Stone from Rebecca” (Paper Lanterns, 26):

Sculpted by the wind’s rough hand,

The raspy cat’s tongue of the rain,

It makes a proper present

From one maker to another.

He writes about many things, not just nature, and I mean many. No wonder! Sloan composes at least a poem a day (on his smartphone, then types them on his computer). Crossings (Rollston Press, 2017) is a down-to-earth and entertaining memoir in verse where the author is “Border-hopping from Arkansas to Oklahoma. Crossing from verbal to visual art forms. Making the transition from past to present” as the back cover notes. You find titles like “The Burial Urn in Mother’s Living Room,” “Scratch Biscuits,” and “The Sound of One Lip Buzzing.” Which brings up another Sloan trademark—his unfailing deadpan humor, an artform all its own. Gerry and I have given many readings together from our duo chapbook Flyways, and he gets the audience softened up and smiling before my serious self steps up to the podium. This one that always gets us laughing—“The Case for Urban Agriculture (Flyways, 7). Here, the narrator learns “not to mess with a testy rooster / whose wives kept disappearing / one by one into the frying pan / after their egg-laying days were done.” But this is not to say Gerry is without tenderness. We find it in many poems, like “Because We Must” (Flyways, 17), where he writes of a bluebird, a fellow songster: “’This is it,’ we shyly warble, / this life so unexpectedly / brimming over.” 

As a transplant from Virginia seven years ago, I met Gerry not long after moving to Fayetteville. His friendship and poetry are treasures to me, and I hope more and more readers will discover this marvelous poet shaped by the people and customs, the creatures, the mountains and everything his observant eye discovers here in the Ozarks to bring clarity, beauty, and conviction to our earthly journeys.

—Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Arkansas Poet Laureate, suzanneunderwoodrhodes.com