Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.

Ron Smith is the author and editor of numerous books, including the award-winning Elf the Eagle and The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke. An excerpt from this book was translated into eighteen languages by Reader's Digest and published in over twenty-two countries. In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from U.B.C. and in 2005 he was the inaugural Fulbright Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Elf's Family Tree is the sequel to his earlier illustrated children's book. He lives with his wife, the writer Patricia Jean Smith, in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island where he daily searches the sky for eagles in full flight.