Daguerreotypes of People, Place, and Time

About the Book

This is a compilation of selected poems written over a span of fifty years or more. They vary in form and meter and consist of lyrics, place-poems, dramatic monologues, and philosophical musings. They are meant to represent one expression of the metaphorical impulse--a force seen by this writer as the promulgator of everything existing on the planet and in our known universe. Metaphor, in other words, is an expression of what I call survival drive, itself a metaphor. Its earliest origins can be observed in the actions of particles moving about in a quantum universe where like particles are attracted to each other outside and within the purview of time. This attraction, this expression of comparison, can be seen as the earliest and most rudimentary form of awareness. Furthermore, it should be noted, these particles are compelled to search out workable combinations, and the "click" that occurs when one is found is tantamount to the creation of metaphor and what, in humans, is called the "A-Ha!" response. Through the process of evolution--and it is important to recognize that in nature time is as exigent as it choses to be--life forms developed with varying degrees of awareness, culminating, ultimately, in the self-concept of Homo sapiens and the production of language--itself a metaphor based, initially, on physical survival drive. Over time, this drive to survive came to be applied to our feelings of emotional well being, what psychologists call self-concept. Poems (and all forms of art) are, in the final analysis, the highest expression of survival drive, this being so because they are not constrained to be about eating and "getting and spending." It has been said that no one reads poetry anymore. If that is so, it´s a sad commentary on human affairs. The combination of feeling and seeing (the gasp of understanding) that constitutes genuine poetry represents the apogee of humaness. Our feet may walk on soil, but our minds can parse the stars! Come read with me and be alive!

About the Author

Eston E. Roberts was born on the twelfth of April, nineteen hundred and thirty-two, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the fi rst born child of Arthurlene Sutton Roberts and Carl Daniel Roberts. At the age of four, he and his two-year-old sister moved with their mother to reside with a great uncle in Damascus, Georgia. Carl Daniel Roberts was supposed to follow, but he never did. His parents divorced and his mother re-married—to James Charlie West ( J.C), a farmer and master of all trades. Eston (called Bobby, in honor of his father) was expected by his ninth year to drive a mule, to break new ground, to lay out and plant rows of peanuts, corn, and cotton— tasks that to the great disapproval of his step-father he was unable to perform adequately. One of his earliest memories is of the day he was taken to the fi elds to plow his fi rst row. His step-father, who had dropped out in elementary school to help his father on the farm and had long since forgotten his own learning curve in the fi eld of agriculture, pointed to a tree down at the end of the fi eld and said, “aim the mule toward that tree, and when you get to the end of the row it will be as straight as an arrow.” Knowing that this assignment was a test of his coming of age, Eston concentrated on that tree with all the intensity he could summon. When they reached the end of the row, both of them looked back down the row to see it wavering and wandering like the track of a snake. “Go on back to the house,” his step-father said, “I’d rather do it myself !” That lonely trek back to the house was the longest of his life. From that time on, when he was unable to live up to the stern standards set by his step-father, his mantra had become, “I don’t care; I’m not going to be a farmer anyway!” Small wonder he ended up as a teacher of English, a novelist, and a writer of poetry–a maker and interpreter of metaphor!