Familiar Smiles and Aging Faces

About the Book

Writing poetry has proven to be a great aid in seeing what I see, hearing what I hear.  From my perspective, something happens, something gets noticed.  The image, the happening strikes my mind, entices some response in words.  An image or sequence of images appear and enter into a line.  The line bears for me a cadence and a sound.  Vowels tend to be important to me and help to elicit a sequence of lines that add onto one another until they reach the point where they stop and the poem ends.  These poems, collected here from what has come my way over the years, represent what has come in a pair of sweeps over a bit of history plus a sampling of more recent poems that I decided to include in this collection.  Often, the poems from the past recall the happening to mind; others leave the occasion obscured and leave the poem to do its work, creating an image and a flow in my own mind.  The poems, once generated in my mind, now write their meaning on my mind afresh.  And, I hope, on yours as well.  For then the poems will have done their work.

About the Author

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. I began writing devotional material in 1981 as a part of my ministry and my own spiritual practice. As my writing habits expanded in those years, I began to notice that some of the stuff I wrote came with a cadence, a sense of sound that moved differently than my usual prose, inviting me to try my hand at poetry. Since 1982, I have practiced that style. Originally, I did free verse but, as I worked with the poems and grew in my sense of line as the basic element of the poem, I found I more and more did my work in metrical styles, with or without end-rhyme. By 1987, metrical verse dominated my styles. For a while, I wrote a goodly number of sonnets but have found that has ebbed over the years. I continue to write, based largely on what I experience as I go about living life - in people and scenery, holidays and history, events and stories. I write pastoral materials, hymn texts, prayers, even a series to a Welsh hymn meter that was said to have escaped use in English settings. This all takes place as I live quietly now in retirement with my wife of 57 years, two dogs and five cats.