Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems

The definitive collection of Tom Sexton's poems about his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, where he grew up after World War II before leaving for military service and higher education. He would settle in Alaska and teach for decades at the University of Alaska, where he co-founded the respected Alaska Quarterly Review. His Lowell poems are lyrical and candid, extracting the innate beauty and tragedy in a working-class mill town down on its luck but full of people with gumption and sometimes incredible optimism. He paints the people, the streetscapes, and the nature of an historic river city, a one-time tribal capital before the label New England and then the archetypal factory city of the American Industrial Revolution before the Civil War, a place that had to been seen by Charles Dickens, Davy Crockett, and young Abe Lincoln, a break-out location for working women who became labor organizers, and eventually a classic post-industrial city passed by when the business titans moved manufacturing to less expensive places. Sexton captures the reality of a hard-luck place without nostalgia and finds the dignity in lives lived within a tight circle. He was able to rise to an upper orbit through service and study, returning to his starting place through poems that offer a priceless gift, a lasting literature for present and future generations.