Robert Emmons is often described as a renaissance man, multi-talented with a wide range of interests. He has been a New York Stock Exchange company CEO, a well-respected international management consultant, a university professor, and an entrepreneur. In addition, he is an art collector and patron, sailor, avid yachtsman, and a poet for more than forty years. The Los Angeles Times called him “a talented poet” and his book
Other Places Other Times “a gem of a book,” and the praise continues.

In the foreword to The Road to Paradise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet
N. Scott Momaday says Emmons “sees beyond the superficial aspects of experience to the realities at the center of our lives. He is thought, perception, and imagination personified. He is one who understands the possibilities of language…he realizes those possibilities precisely, without overreaching or falling short.”

In the foreword to The Wanderer, Chryss Yost, Co-Editor of California Poetry, says, “Emmons’ passion for life is the basis for all his poems, whether celebrating life’s pleasures or mourning lives squandered and lost.” His poems “are an invitation to visit new heights.”

There is a clarity, directness, and honesty in Robert Emmons that is reflected both in his poems and in his life as a respected business leader and teacher. Above all, Emmons is a humanist whose concern for the human condition dominates his poetry. He is an astute observer of life and the irony often found in dealing with life’s challenges and the choices we must make.

Emmons has been the recipient of numerous awards from the business community including the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Executive of the Year Award and the Food Industry Hall of Fame Award. He has also received a number of honors for his philanthropy and community-service efforts, including the Herbert Hoover Humanitarian Award, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Wright Ludington Lifetime Achievement Award, the City of Hope Community Leader Award, and the Los Angeles Boy Scouts Distinguished Citizen Award.

In his newest volume Seafarers, Poems of the Sea (to be published by the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum in February 2007), Jean-Michel Cousteau, Ocean Futures Society, says, “This poetry takes you on an amazing journey of travel, dreams, and emotions along the infinite waves of the sea.” Emmons comments in his foreword to the book, “My travels have taken me on a life’s journey peopled by a variety of wanderers, sailors, fishermen, merchant mariners, scientists, yachtsmen, and environmentalists. Some with agendas, some seeking fortunes, others just drifting but all caught up in the mystery, the danger, the power, the awe-inspiring beauty of the sea.”

The book, which combines the exciting photography of Larry Dale Gordon with Emmons’ poetry, roams the seas of the world exploring the human condition. It is
not to be missed.