sentences:  While selections of his poetry, eloquent and intensely personal, are scattered throughout the present volume, the topic at hand concerns a boy ever in search of his missing father, or a surrogate.After growing up in Oklahoma during the Depression, son of a dirt-poor sharecropper and an obsessive mother who hated dirt in all its forms, Ray was shuffled among relatives and foster homes, later spending time on an Arizona ranch.He became self-supporting as a teenager and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago.