Tom Sexton

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Tom Sexton (1940-2025) offers his final book of new poems ranging from lyrics about life and nature in his longtime home Alaska, reflections on the ancient Chinese poets he admired, and images from his days in Down East Maine later in his life. --Tom Sexton

Cummiskey Alley brings together the best of Tom Sextons poems about the place where he was born and grew up, the mill-lined river city of Lowell, Massachusetts -- a place he never took his eye off, no matter his location. For most of his life hes been in Alaska, writing, teaching, editing a respected literary journal, and always observing the large and small wonders in the world. Hes filled many books with poems that tell us what hes seen and heard and felt. In the Northwest and around the Pacific Rim, Sexton is known as a premier poet of the natural world, from birds to mountains. But theres another side to this writer, a deep investigator and lyrical beat reporter whose subject is his working-class, ethnic-American hometown where hes returned regularly, sometimes anonymously to better absorb the facts and fill the blotter at the night desk in the hall of records. The poems hes drawn from memory and recent inspection stand for the experience of a thousand small industrial cities that were made by immigrants and often got knocked down by merciless economic winds, only to get their legs back under them and move forward. As universal as they may be, places like Lowell need a literature to call their own. The New York Times described Sexton as an atavistic avatar of how to look hard yet write simply. Merrimack Valley Magazine wrote: Each poem unveils something new, and at times breathtaking, about one of the Merrimack Valleys most diverse and interesting places . . . Sextons characters, relationships, and places spring from the page, brought to life by a tiny gesture or minute detail.

“On the night Li Bai tried to embrace the moon / in its fullness on the surface of the Yangtze River, / blossoms scented the air, and beyond the moon / pale stars powdered the sky. That faint shiver / of white near the surface was a dolphin rising. / I carry a book of his poems whenever I travel, / poems that touch the heart like a gentle snow. / Look, over there in that marsh, a snowy egret rising.” The day after their wedding, Tom and Sharyn Sexton set off on the more than 4,500-mile journey from Massachusetts to Alaska. Now, more than fifty years later, Tom Sexton is retracing those steps through his exceptional poetry. He describes the communities they passed through and ruminates on the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the decades since. He still finds hope in the country and draws transformative hope from the land that connects all of us. Appropriate for a journey that moves from east to west, the Sexton’s real-life voyage is embedded in the imaginary journey of the ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai, from Broad Pass to Polychrome Pass in the Alaska Range.

This all-new collection by former Alaska poet laureate Tom Sexton smoothly blends his life in Maine, his years in Alaska, and his love of Chinese poetry - which has been a key influence on his work - into a lyrical fantasy that will enchant lovers of verse. These tightly rhythmic, compact eight-line poems demonstrate a rare deftness with - and an even more uncommon ear for - language, revealing poetic form to be neither a puzzle nor an accomplishment in itself, but a compositional tool and a spur to creativity.

This collection of new and selected poems by the former poet laureate of Alaska, Tom Sexton, opens a door on the essence of life in Alaska and Maine. Sexton divides his year between the two states, and he captures here the small but powerful sensual details of day-to-day life in these contrasting, yet similar, environs. His carefully crafted verse distills the birch and aspen, lynx and ptarmigan, and the snow on high peaks. Through his poems we thrill to encounters with the wild, the seasons, and the sublime landscape. From 'At East Machais': The moon's pale light is a ghost in a white shift moving downhill past houses that mirror its whiteness as it goes. If a door opens, it will enter as it always has.