Final Path by Ron Lands

Beginning with the opening poem in Ronald Lands’ Final Path and its evocation of a past time when a young soldier hears from a long distance away his father’s dying call, the poet leads the reader gently through the experience of being present during the last days of a loved one. The image-driven poems are rich with Lands’ medical knowledge combined with his keen eye for detail and heart for the pain of losing someone dear. There is joy, too, in remembering a baseball game where rounding the bases becomes a metaphor as the runner “turn[s] toward home, / where the wind dances with the trees / and night birds fly figure eights in the streetlight.” And there is peace in the collection’s final image of a family burial plot where bird song, the sound of the wind, and the “slap of broad drops” become “echoes of mercy, whispers of love.”

–Connie Jordan Green, author of Slow Children Playing and Regret Comes to Tea (Finishing Line Press); Household Inventory, Winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize; and Darwin’s Breath (Iris Press).

Ron Lands rich poems present a son’s journey to escort his father on his Final Path. In “Now and Then” Lands’ father once covered his son with his body to save him from a falling tree, “he shrugged the tree off his bruised shoulder, held me so tight, I didn’t want to let him go.” The double meaning of this ending, is a powerful message for the book itself. In “Listen to the Ocean” while the father labors to breathe, Lands reminds him of happier times when his father told him that moonlight floating on the water was the highway to heaven. Yet the poem ends with the knowledge that too soon the son will stay and breathe alone. Part of the power of these poems emanates from Lands’ skillful subtleties, a difficult mastery that lets the reader find the power of experiences. The book ends with “Family Plot” where, among scarred headstones, the poet listens for “the call of songbirds, a gentle wind on dry branches, the slap of broad drops on flat leaves, echoes of mercy, whispers of love.” Don’t miss this lyrical, image rich journey of a son’s intimacy, a son’s devotion.

–Bill Brown

In this debut collection of poems by Ron Lands aptly titled Final Path, a gentle soulful poet, “one who is fluent in the language of grief,” takes readers on a journey filled with both pathos and memory, a poignant journey wrought with “learning to walk alone” where we all learn to “stay and breathe alone.” Each poem in this honest and thought provoking chapbook pulls the reader along a path of heart pain and loss, even the personal space of a man where “dust around his briarwood pipes” evokes empathy for a son admonishing a doctor not to tell him “what his daddy wants.” Lands juxtaposes pain, love, and loss in a room of “tubes/ that sprout from his arms and neck, branch/ like vines to form an arbor over his head.” His beautiful language softens the sterile rooms of dying, where “walls stand silent/as undertakers” and a “ventilator sighs.” This journey of living and dying along that final path universally touches all of us who are never “ready for [a loved one] to go” yet are shored up and “mesmerized/ by moonlight floating” in our memories of love.

–Sue Dunlap