Saturday Review: “Let Us All Be Happy” a review by Janis Harrington in NCLR Online Spring 2025 of Ralph Earle’s poetry collection, Everything You Love Is New (2024)
Another early look at a review in the forthcoming NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue!
Our 2023 Applewhite Poetry Contest winner, Janis Harrington, reviews this new collection by her co-host of the 2nd Sundays Poetry Reading series in Chapel Hill, Ralph Earle. It’s not uncommon for reviewers to know personally the authors they are reading, this being “the writing-est state” and all. So Harrington writes from experience how “We are delighted to share his journey through these generous, meditative, and gently humorous poems” as he “takes readers through seven decades of stories, telling us of his tales as a son, brother, husband, and father.”
Harrington pulls from near a dozen poems, including several that speak directly to Earle’s experiences of privilege and racism: “The family is left with an untended orchard:
Every spring brought fewer blossoms
as the white-painted beehives faded
and grew empty. One spring they were gone
and my father taught us to play baseball
among the apple trees and poison ivy.
Closing the poem with barren trees and poison ivy, Earle employs nature to express the toxicity of prejudice.”
Harrington writes, “While Earle’s poems encompass the darkness, he always seeks light and love, believing, as he states in “The Last Purple Blossoms,” that “Love’s threads will pull me through.” He closes the collection with a benediction. A conductor moves through a train car calling out, “ladies and gentlemen / as we slowly take our leave of this world / so random and so transient let us all be happy.” We are happy to have the company of these wise and luminous poems as we travel through our own lives.”
Read the preview from the Online Winter 2025 issue! And order the book here.
