Back Home Awhile

Home in these poems is small-town or rural Ohio: Van Wert, the poet’s birthplace to which he returns briefly en route to Granville and his undergraduate education at Denison University; then Granville and its surrounding countryside, where he lives for over four decades, at times on a small farm. Two early poems describe his homecoming to Van Wert. The following works portray not only his own experiences and their settings in Granville’s Licking County, but also other inhabitants-privileged, thwarted, displaced, ill, or dying-of this Ohio heartland. The author’s home, some poems show, is temporal as well as geographic: historical, the realm of a recorded or remembered past; and mortal, a region with raw new housing developments and ever-fewer aging, dying farms.