Puppet in a Shadow Play

R.A. Erber was born in New Jersey to a working-class family near the end of the Depression. While attending public school, he found work as a day laborer, factory hand, sheet metal worker, machine operator, warehouseman, and construction arc welder before joining the Army as a combat engineer. Subsequently, he took up graduate studies in medieval poetry at Rutgers University but made a career with the US Department of Defense. After retirement, he and his wife built their new home on top of a high mountain ridge in the Appalachian Range of West Virginia, where they lived peacefully in relatively contended isolation, apart from the many deer, sheep, dogs, and cats they cared for. At his wife’s insistence, they have traveled to all fifty states and the provinces of Canada. The author is a self-taught poet and illustrator.