Poet in High Street Park
Salem, Massachusetts’s poet laureate J.D. Scrimgeour’s new book of poems and prose, Poet in High Street Park (Loom), is a powerful portrait of a place. Scrimgeour writes of Salem, “this city unafraid of the undead,” a city he’s called home for thirty years, its people, its personality, its hard-knockery and down-and-outery (“I write of basements flooded / and duct-taped cars”), its bricks, its breaths, its beauty. “Heard the weather last night / hurting the shore.” He writes of fathers and sons, of Little League fields, of what it is to live in a city so freighted with history, “a nation’s first millionaire, / first telephone. The founder of kindergarten,” and much deeper, darker history than that. “Looking backward, we can see what wasn’t, / and then what was. Cautions and wonders.” Cautions and wonders — it could’ve been an alternative title for the collection, capturing as it does what was and what is now, the dangers, the traps, the awe on offer.
Scrimgeour captures the specific texture of the North Shore accent, the package stores and gas stations, the familiar faces in the streets. The essays and dispatches concern teaching at Salem State, baseball, tuned always to struggle and hardship and the grace, now and then, of triumph, however small. There’s a matter-of-factness, a direct and generous attention, reminding us how much can be expressed by attention paid to what is closest to us, the streets and people of the place we call home. “The popcorn at the Willows is still / the best around, and the new pier / is a good place to fish.” - Nina MacLaughlin, New England Literary News
