Cruising at Sixty to Seventy: Poems and Essay - Softcover

Tilley, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597095362 ISBN 13: 9781597095365

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Log

Nothing to do but slump against the log, let his heart slow, try to talk himself down, make it back. He’d had to straddle it, let his front leg dangle, pull his back leg over. As he jumped to the ground, he wasn’t aware of anything but a stab in his calf. A rattlesnake slithered off. He sat, oddly calm, his mind molting as the sun began to poke through the sassafras and dapple the forest floor, cicadas winding themselves up in the morning heat, the growing concert making it harder to concentrate. Live in the moment, his wife had said, and in a way this was a good moment, everything around him at peace, even the snake. But he had to write it all down while he still had some mind to. He removed a crumpled sheet of paper from his left pocket, rummaged around his right and found he’d forgotten a pen.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597095362
• ISBN 13: 9781597095365
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120