Perry, Ronald Lee, 1932-1982

Persona

Perry, Ronald Lee, 1932-1982

Ronald Perry was born in Miami, Florida, in 1932, but spent most of his childhood on Key Largo where his parents operated a fishing lodge. He enrolled at the University of Miami receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1954. He then joined the Army and served two years as a cryptographer leaving in 1956 to enroll in graduate studies, only briefly, at the University of Iowa. Perry returned to Miami, published his first volume of poems, The Fire Nursery and Other Poems, and soon thereafter traveled to Southeast Asia where he worked for an engineering firm. In 1959, Perry published Rock Harbor and in 1960 The Pipe Smokers : An Ecologue for an Unspecified Occasion. Perry then moved to the Bahamas where he lived for eleven years. In 1962 Voyages from Troy was published, but he published little else until Denizens appeared in 1980, a volume chosen by Donald Justice, whom Perry met while a student at the University of Miami, for the National Poetry Series. Perry was preparing a manuscript entitled In the Smoke at the time of his death in 1982.