The Long Road Home

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

“Home is where we start from,” T.S. Eliot once said. For Eric
Trethewey, home is also a continuing source of reflection and
belongingness, of “mixing memory with observation.” Divided into
five sections, this book chronicles the poet’s life experience, mixing
brashness, violence, and aridity with rarer moments of poignancy,
tenderness, and compassion. The prevailing mood is one of sombre
nostalgia. Trethewey has a keen eye for the sights and sounds in
nature’s ever-changing seasons and the lessons they convey. He also
has a remarkable ability to portray these sights and sounds in vivid
metaphor, as in “the sibilant tongues of leaves” or hawks seen as
“scythe-beaked surveyors.” Many of these poems previously appeared
in various journals. A.J. Lee’s cover photograph, “silently
expressing old mortality,” is a masterpiece in itself.