Seaward A Lyrical Memoir
There are heavy doses of salt water in Nick Stone’s memoir of his first eighty-eight years. The ocean is his overall metaphor, but there is so much more, as he takes us from infancy through childhood, career, love in many forms, aging and mortality driven home by a terminal diagnosis. There is agony when at two he feels displaced by a new baby sister, and again as a stutter “traps his tongue/ in tangled twisted knots.” And there is humor when a surreptitious teenage trip to a burlesque theater goes drastically awry. He shows us the ordeals of the North Atlantic in winter, the beauties of desert sunsets “painted by the brush of God” and of the island he has always loved and to which he returns “to write my farewell poems.” Along the way he finds “intimations of immortality” almost everywhere. And then there are The Winter Poems of confinement, despair, COVID, and George Floyd. SEAWARD shows us what the vividly recalled memories of a long life can inspire when told in “the language of the gods, the angels/and my grandmother.” Like his beloved ocean, SEAWARD can take you as far and as deep as you will ever want to go.
