The seventy-eight poems in this collection--from four lines to six pages in length--were composed over a period of almost forty years and can be considered episodes of a memoir, an autobiography in verse documenting the author's life, loves and travels.
The dictionary defines "divagation" as a wandering or a digression. Therefore many of the poems in this collection evoke the author's voyages that have taken him to forty-seven countries around the world.
Divagations is also a virtual handbook of poetic forms ranging from the elegance of the Spenserian Stanza to free verse. There are ballads and ballades, odes and ottava rima, rondels and rondeaux. Like many English-language poets, the author has a fondness for the sonnet; included is a sequence of twenty-four love sonnets. He has also included three sestinas, one in French. A long, narrative poem in blank verse recounts the adventures of one Poor Fisher, who travels to the Caribbean and attempts to establish a new religion with himself as its prophet.
Ronald W. Kenyon studied English literature at the University of Michigan and Stanford and became familiar with the entire history of English poetry, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration to the modernism of William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound; this entire legacy has left its mark on his poetry. The reader will also find allusions to modern Spanish-language poets, notably Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Lorca.
Included in an appendix are extensive annotations by Catherine Jagor, a Paris-based poet who has known the author for over a quarter of a century and is intimately familiar with his work.
"After reading this collection, you will be changed, enriched and inspired." Jean-Pierre Collet, author of Le Chant du Naïf and Harmonies.
About the Author: Ronald W. Kenyon was born and raised in Ashland, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied English, Spanish and political science and won two Hopwood creative writing awards. The recipient of a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, he attended graduate school at Stanford University and studied at St. Lawrence University under a National Defense Education Act scholarship. He was certified as a French-English liaison interpreter by the U.S. Department of State Office of Language Services. Also by Ronald W. Kenyon: A Winter in the Middle of Two Seas: Real Stories from Bahrain Monville: Forgotten Luminary of the French Enlightenment Monville: l'inconnu des Lumières Le Petit Kenyon: Dining in the Environs of Paris for Walkers Statues of Liberty: Real Stories from France On the Trail in France Floridians: Real Stories from the Sunshine State Photography: Metro Portraits Metro Messages My Beautiful France: Landscapes Île-de-France, terres d'inspiration France Images & Messages