Gerald William Barrax is a poet of ideas, a writer with intelligence, vision, depth, versatility, and passion. He culls the best traditions of poetry writing and makes use of traditional and original structures; his subjects span the distances between love and death, romance and reality, and drought and nourishment. Introspective postures and a voice comfortable with itself characterize his poetry as he questions, exposes, and criticizes the intricacies of a world that remains enigmatic for human beings concerned with truth and integrity.

Barrax was born on 21 June 1933 in Attalla, Alabama, to Aaron and Dorthera Hedrick Barrax, but in 1944 he moved with his parents to Pittsburgh, where he and his brother, Harold, grew up. The neighborhood of Homewood, popularized in the fiction of John Wideman, provoked Barrax to reminisce about his own growing to maturity there, but those memories in his poetry are subsumed in a broader context without...