Footprints are a collection of poems that were either written or revised recently or recalled from work begun and lost fifty years before. Some recall pleasant memories of my beloved Veronica and some of her later struggles with ill health. She was born and grew up in Dublin and Ireland remained a special place for both of us. The DART from Howth to Greystones "tunnels under Queen V's crown and pops out for the view above Killiney Bay" where "the magic face of Ireland is found." We met and married in Syracuse. Events and places from that time are featured in some of the poems. Newtown Plus Five was written shortly after news coverage of the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre. An Elegy for One and Many commemorates the life of a friend of the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue rampage who died during the same period. Many of the poems are written in traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes.
A number of poems reflect concerns about America: the face it presents to the world and the state of its democracy. Ode from a Colonial Bowl recounts a family history of its founding.
Flint where "once-upon-a-time America coursed through (its) leaden arteries to nurse its middle class." In Vietnam "we've grown old, some fifty years removed from when our universe was rolled into a white-hot ball," to find the common threads we shared in youth to pursue our common legacy. American Graffiti asks, "Can Cicero and Caesar coexist within republican constraint?"
Let Freedom Ring calls upon us to answer "the distant bells of freedom pealing " in Ukraine. The challenge is to understand how both poems can be compatible with our logic.
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979-8-89190-153-7 (9798891901537)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
James Ten Eyck was born and grew up in Somerville, NJ. He received a BS in Mathematics in 1963 from Lafayette College and worked in several capacities at IBM, and Endicott for five years before enrolling full-time at Syracuse University. He received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1973. He met and married his wife, Veronica, in Syracuse where their son, David was born. After leaving Syracuse, he began an academic career that took the family to several cities and colleges including Worcester, MA, where he added an MS in Computer Science from WPI. Dr. TenEyck retired from teaching in 2009 after 25 years at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Upon retirement, he took the opportunity to pursue his life-long ambition to write. His first book, The Life and Times of Walter Reuther: An Unfinished liberal Legacy (Page Publishing c 2016; and republished by Page Vision Press in 2023) combined his interest in history and public affairs to tell the story of the transformative years of the mid-twentieth century through the lens of a person involved with most of the movements, policies, and leaders of that period. Since publishing that book, Dr. Ten Eyck has been writing poetry. This volume, More Footprints, is a revised and augmented version of Footprints (Outskirts Press c 2022). His wife, Veronica, died in the fall of 2021 and is remembered in many of the poems in this book.
