Salem State College: Sextant

In his poem, “A Blessing,” Tom Sexton justifies the telling of a tender, tall tale to a child because, “Like mist rising from water, /it blesses the life that knows it.” So, too, does Sexton’s fourth volume of poetry, Autumn in the Alaskan Range. It blesses the life that knows it.

The book also provides further evidence that Sexton is a serious poet with something to say about a vast array of subjects. Autumn is about nature and man’s place in nature. It’s about snow, fog, flowers, berries, plums, cranes, an isolated cabin in Alaska, caribou, Eskimo folklore, Chinese poets, snowmobiles, Alaskan mountains, ice, the coast of Maine, Yuppies, abandoned New England mill towns, graveyards, family, friends, constellations, and the creating spirit as seen through the eyes of a poet at age sixty.

Sexton measures these things day by day, season by season, and year by year. The book is a well crafted artistic mix of the universal and the personal, the macrocosmic and the microcosmic, in which the poet expresses reverence for things of this earth by means of short, intimate poems that extol the theme but not the theme maker.

Reading Autumn is like walking through the woods with John Muir as the guide or looking at the bird prints of John Audubon. No wonder, in 1995, the Alaska legislature approved Sexton’s nomination as the state’s Poet Laureate, a bit of the unexpected for a person born and raised in the economically depressed, New England mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack Kerouac is Lowell’s most prominent writer. Tom Sexton is, perhaps, its most prominent poet.

Born in 1940, Sexton grew up during the depression of the nineteen-fifties, in a city with a polluted river and deserted mills. He was graduated from Lowell High School in 1958. He spent three years in the army, two of them while stationed in Alaska. After being discharged, he worked odd jobs before enrolling in Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He then entered Salem State College. After graduation in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Sexton traveled to the University of Alaska–Fairbanks where he earned a master of fine arts degree.

From 1970-1994, Sexton taught English and creative writing at the University of Alaska–Anchorage. He resurfaced at Salem State College in the fall of 1995 when he gave a reading from his most recent book of poetry, Late August on the Kenai River, as part of the English depart-ment’s writers’ series.

When Autumn was released in the summer of 2000, Sexton sent me a copy of the book. We had graduated from the same class at Lowell High. I thought I knew Tom Sexton fairly well. But I didn’t. This
realization came after I read the publisher’s note on the back cover of Autumn:

Not all of the poems are set in Alaska. There are poems about growing up in a decaying mill town and the suicide of the poet’s mother and how the past is always with us.

In a 1995 interview, Sexton had told me that his mother had died of a bad heart. But the poem “Memoir,” in his new collection of poetry, reveals not only that his mother hanged herself in the basement of the family home, but also that Sexton’s older sister was fathered by a man other than Tom’s father, Raymond. Sexton did not know this until he was well into his fifties.

The book is divided into six sections with a total of seventy poems. They are clear, concise, well crafted, and imagistic, some with the added delight of a story being told. His poems are tidy, little gift-wrapped presents of artistry in verse.

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