Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems

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.