First Kingdoms: Poems from a Vanishing Landscape

Like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, these poems evoke childhood moments— from the dream-like states of infancy to the early exhilarations of nature, animals, games, school, sex, and the earliest discoveries of love. Such elusive memories are screened through the double lens of the boy’s innocence and the grown man’s more complex awareness. In exploring the world of the poet’s personal history, First Kingdoms also records and celebrates a type of childhood less and less known to today’s digitally-obsessed generations.