Cover image of "The Surfacing of Joy" book by Loblolly Press, featuring abstract artwork with bright, joyful colors.

The Surfacing of Joy

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Learn about the author and the book

Earl J. Wilcox spent decades teaching others to read carefully. The Surfacing of Joy, his debut collection at ninety, is evidence of what that kind of attention accumulates over a lifetime.

These poems move through the everyday with the clarity of someone who has learned not to rush past small things — birds in the yard, cosmos blooming in the medians, the quiet company of a long marriage. They also hold grief without flinching, and find that joy, as Wilcox puts it, comes in the constant "making and hearing and seeing" of a life lived alongside others.

Wilcox is a retired professor and founding editor of The Robert Frost Review at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Surfacing of Joy is Loblolly Press's first publication.

Earl J. Wilcox, born in 1933, writes poems that capture the wonders of everyday life—from birds and baseball to the musings of famous writers and the pulse of current events. A retired professor and founding editor of The Robert Frost Review, Wilcox spent decades shaping minds at Winthrop University. His poetry, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has found a home in both print and online journals, resonating with readers far and wide. The Surfacing of Joy is his debut collection, a deeply personal exploration of the joys and sorrows of a life well-lived. Earl calls Rock Hill, SC home, where he writes poetry every day, finding meaning in both the quiet moments and the ones that shout.

Praise

Earl Wilcox writes with heart—a heart that beats with baseball; a heart that races with news of politics, peace, and war; a heart that murmurs elegies for the famous and the celebrated; a heart that breaks for the trials visited on the rest of us. But Earl does not wear his heart on a sentimental sleeve; rather he embeds it in craft and artistry developed over—dare I say it—a very long lifetime. And yet it is ‘The urge to know what lies / Ahead more than gone before,’ as Earl has elsewhere written, that you will find and feel in this book.
— James Penha, Editor of The New Verse News
Like a well-loved chest, handed down through time, The Surfacing of Joy is a catalog of vistas and snapshots and left-behind notes, hidden in secret drawers, to be discovered anew, in the mystery of language well played. The scholar’s ear is in the cadence, but the joy is clearly in the expedition.
— Evelyne Weeks
From the wild bloom of cosmos along a roadside to the quiet marvels of family, Wilcox’s poems leave readers grateful for the beauty in life’s simplest moments.
— Andrew Mack, Managing Editor, Loblolly Press

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