Beneath Stars Long Extinct - Softcover

Fascinated by the themes of random chance, love, death, and health, Ron Egatz builds poems chronicling human conditions both self-inflicted and unavoidable in his debut publication Beneath Stars Long Extinct.

The collection’s title refers to the light from stars reaching us after traveling millions of years; light from stars which may have died before humans walked the our planet. Egatz’s process of writing poems often seems as long, with each poem going through approximately forty drafts.

Little-known historical figures and subjects of news stories find their way into these poems. Airline stowaways, the victim of the first auto accident in the United States, and former Hollywood legend George Raft make appearances in this collection. Narrators describing encounters with characters ranging from washed-up rock musicians to former lovers, war veterans to family members.

“I see fragility everywhere,” says Egatz. “If we didn’t face this fact previously, our times dictate it to us daily now: across borders, in our environment, throughout the global economy, biologically, and countless other ways. I’m also interested in the temporary nature of life and all things we hold precious, like the people we love and our relationships with them, for example. My poems hold up examples of this. Sometimes people write me after finding a poem of mine in a magazine and they say things like, ‘you said something in this poem I always knew, but never verbalized.’ I allow myself to feel good about this for about ten minutes, then I go back to agonizing over the next poem and its revisions.”

A poet with a large and loyal following in the greater New York area, for years Egatz has been giving readings to FoEs (Friends of Egatz, as one fan on a blog termed them) and recent converts interested in lucid verse. Pursuing poetry for 25 years to the month of publication of this book, Egatz explores the limits of the lyric narrative poem with subject matter spanning historical events to family snapshots. This collection is a rally cry for poetry unafraid of being understood, yet not sacrificing lyric quality, music, or emotional depth.