Rick Tobin

Heather 'round the Stone Rick Tobin

Here is poetry for the love sick, downtrodden, and the happy who need a wake up call. The Irish have a way about them: they laugh in the face of death, and mourn at moments of joy. There's no explaining it. It comes with the blood and from sitting around the table at night telling the stories of the day-of the hero's glory and victim's wounds. Here lie the bones of forty years of experiences-sometimes deeply troubling, sometimes uplifting, often dark, and some lighthearted. The works here stretch from the age of fourteen until my middle fifties-to cover the hates, loves, lusts, pains, frustrations, failures and successes that proceeded along a very winding path. Irish blood runs in the ink through them all, and over the skeleton made from the stone of Tara, which cannot be denied. Denial of the spirit's voice is not possible by any with the heritage from the Blessed Isle, for that murmuring grows over and through the soul, like heather 'round the stone.