About Ron McFarland

Ron McFarland was born in Ohio, grew up in Florida, taught for a couple of years in Texas and Illinois, and in 1970 came to Idaho, where, in 1984, he was named the state’s first Writer-in-Residence. He teaches a variety of courses at the University of Idaho, including Hemingway seminars. In addition to five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is his new and selected poems, Stranger in Town (Confluence Press, 2000), his books include a scholarly study of the villanelle, poetry and critical anthologies, and critical studies on various writers, including David Wagoner and James Welch. The Idaho State University Press will publish his fiction and nonfiction from Idaho, Catching First Light, in 2001. He is faculty advisor for UI Soccer Club and an avid, though sometime inept, fly fisherman, bird hunter and fantasy footballer. His wife, Elsie teaches English as a Second Language at UI. They have three grown children (Kim, Jenny, and Jon, all of them splendid in various ways.

The Hemingway Poems
Ron McFarland

$7.00
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ISBN: 1-877603-74-0

"Like the drunken, half-pagan revelers of Pamplona leaping to the drum, Ron McFarland's poems take the mythic figure of Ernest Hemingway as an image to dance around. Bursting with poetic licentiousness and mordant wit, they use details garnered from Hemingway's astonishing life and work to explore the central paradox of art-the transfiguration of ordinary, unlovely reality into extraordinary, inspirational beauty. The poems take the doubleness of Hemingway-his simultaneous status in our culture as an icon of swaggering boorishness and of amazing grace” as the doubleness of art, and ask us to contemplate the mystery of how one might explain the other. A bit reminiscent of Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love, The Hemingway Poems will delight connoisseurs of poetry and Hemingway aficionados alike.”

—Susan Beegel, Editor, The Hemingway Review

“Ron McFarland is a Hemingway scholar and Idaho fisherman. Despite these handicaps, I know of no poet better armed to hunt the bravado and pathos of Papa in verse. McFarland counters a justifiably huge admiration for his subject with a healthy, necessary irreverence. He is a poet-fool, fine and nimble, warbling in the forest of a dark god still refusing to be silenced or torn asunder. Read this chapbook.

—Gaylord Brewer, Willamette Poetry Prize Winner, 2000

Hemingway in Africa: The Untold Story

During his first trip to the Serengeti
Hemingway killed more than thirty
wild animals, including three lions,
and one uncelebrated parakeet
belonging to the only woman he ever met
but never wrote or talked about.
She must have betrayed him
and one sultry afternoon,
buoyed on Beefeater's,
he popped open the wicker cage
and watched the bird's powder blue flight
to the lower limb of a camphor tree.
He grinned, but not maliciously, knowing
she would not speak to him again.
She must have been beautiful,
the best of the lot, perhaps
more gorgeous than The Kraut herself
to force him to lift up
his elephant gun, his short, ugly,
shockingly big-bored .505 Gibbs,
straight out of the pages of "The Short,
Happy Life of Francis Macomber,"
and blow that parakeet to smithereens.

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1997-2003
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