ISLAND DREAMS

Hi Gerry and Lorry.

I just finished reading Island Dreams, all in one sitting. If I were a poet like you, I could say all I want to say about the book in ten words. Being more limited, it would take me 100 times that. It is a book of love on many levels. Bob and Susan did a wonderful job in editing it and designing it. I like the page-size and square format because there is a lot of white space for the poems to breathe. The lack of illustrations in the main part of the book contributes to that open space also. It says, these poems can sit by themselves, they need no other support, and that space invites the reader to sit with each individual poem as long as she wants, not rushing, crowding. Reading the poems was, as I expected, a chance to visit some old friends and times, but meet a lot of new ones also.  There is a smoothness to the way Bob chose to group them. And the poems themselves, the work, are just lovely. It is like you have a vision into a crack in the world and you show us what you see, you give us light and wisdom and touch our hearts, all with so few words. What a journey. I was happy to see that you and Lorry ended up back at the reunion, slightly greyer in the hair, but no less loving or loved. Congratulations. I hope you are as proud of the book as we are of you.

Much love,

Alice

Alice Winston Carney, author of A Cowgirl in Search of a Horse: A Memoir

 It's such a great pleasure to wait and to have a book in mind that waits with you. In this case many years went into Island Dreams, actually about 50. That seems astounding to me, but yet this is my 70th year on earth.  Our friend Alice W. Carney, a really fine writer in her own right (write), has said as much as I could say about this book of ours. One of the poems in the book dates back to 1963 and describes a hitchhiking trip from Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Quebec City where we -- two friends and myself -- sang for our supper and rode a few hundred feet on a freight train and spent a night in a Montreal jail for vagrancy.

The poem "Quebec City" won a poetry prize and earned me (at age 19) a payment of $50.00 thus proving that a poet could make his way in the world, with his thumb out and his wallet handy. I was to learn as I went on down the road and Island Dreams tells the tale of living on island after island until the islands weren't islands any more -- they were just isolated pieces of earth, or sand, where we pitched our tent of love and went on from there. When I say "our" I am speaking of Lorry and Gerry, and later on, Mariah and Hannah, our daughters.

Jack Kerouac called his days with thumb out, "A billowy trip in the world." I have always thought that's what it is to be alive ... to breathe deeply and look out of unjaded eyes at all that is around you. And that's what poetry is, a little eye-prayer to all the things a baby sees. My deepest thanks go to Bob and Susan Arnold, editors and designers at Longhouse Publishers and Booksellers. It was Bob's idea to have me reach back all the way to the beginning, thumb out, and expectant that a ride would come. And it's been quite a ride.

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/