Lessons from Summer Camp

(Hardback)

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In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting conte

Reviews

Jim Tilley s Lessons from Summer Camp would make Wordsworth proud since it is affection recollected in tranquility. Boys leave a ceremonial world of finger sandwiches and afternoon tea to step into a greener and wider one. There Tilley and his friends learn the value and limitations of teamwork and play games that sort out leaders from followers. As sunlit as these poems can be, a prescient and observant Tilley also finds that sometimes life is always a night in the wilderness. On a canoe trip he hears two loons calling, one as if lost, the other answering, I m over here as the author himself searches for his place in the world. Ron Koertge"
Reading this book is like returning to those sometimes fraught but mostly carefree days of summer camp or, for the uninitiated among us, like taking our blindfolds off and discovering that vivid world for the first time. Tilley s poems are refreshingly direct, maybe because, as he says in J-Stroke and Sweep, You can t see the metaphor when you re a Camper. He sees the metaphors now but doesn t bear down on them too hard, and the lessons of the title never seem forced. Jim Tilley earns a 3rd feather for this third book. Jeffrey Harrison"

Author Bio

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. His poetry collections include In Confidence (2011) and Cruising at Sixty to Seventy (2014), both from Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, has appeared as a Ploughshares Solo e-book, an audiobook through Audible.com, and in a Ploughshares print anthology. His poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily and on the PBS News Hours art blog, among others, and has won Sycamore Reviews Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.