Cruising at Sixty to Seventy: Poems and Essay

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Cruising at Sixty to Seventy is the second book from award-winning poet Jim Tilley. In three sections--Dear Wife, Dear Self, Dear Friends--the speaker, a physicist and mathematician by education, now retired from a career on Wall Street, reflects on everyday experience, finding grace and drama in life's smaller moments. As in Tilley's debut collection, In Confidence, many poems use ideas, problems, and puzzles from physics and mathematics to explore personal relationships, such as "Particle and Wave," in which a fundamental concept from quantum mechanics becomes a metaphor for the ripples and collisions on the fabric of family life. The book ends with a personal essay, "The Elegant Solution" (originally published as a Ploughshares Solo), about Tilley's relationship with his father based on the language of mathematics.

Reviews

Praise for Jim Tilley's First Book, In Confidence

"Jim Tilley does confide in his readers here as he explores a refreshing variety of subjects--everything from the complexity of father-son and husband-wife relations to the more solvable problems of dark matter and the origins of the cosmos. But what wins our confidence is not his range but his steady hand on the poem and his steady gaze at the world."
--Billy Collins

Jim Tilley is a bracing and quietly confident writer, able to consistently surprise us, whether in missives from domestic life, topical poems, or poems which quirkily address what he calls "the big questions." These are wry, bittersweet, and unobtrusively instructive poems in the tradition of Wilbur, Schuyler, and Dunn, and they are very much worth reading.
--David Wojahn

Author Bio

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. His first collection of poetry, In Confidence, was published by Red Hen Press in 2011. His poems have been published in literary journals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He has won the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry, the New England Poetry Club's Firman Houghton Award, and an International Publication Award from Atlanta Review. He lives in Bedford Corners, New York.