The ambition to live simply, quietly, and gently requires a vision so different from the one contemporary society encourages that one should feel privileged by the presence of a poet who can hold to this ambition, who is not persuaded by opportunities for spurious celebrity to abjure the values that have sustained him as a poet and as a private person. The quiet simplicity of Gibbons Ruark's poetry is its greatest strength. Many of the nouns that describe this kind of art--grace, ease, poise, balance, steadiness, wholeness, patience, calmness, and so forth--are to be found plentifully in his poetry, as if he wanted to show readers his goals and to demonstrate that these qualities can still be attained if they can be faithfully imagined.

Ruark was born on 10 December 1941 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Henry Gibbons Ruark and Sarah Jenkins Ruark. The elder Ruark was a Methodist...