Lessons from Summer Camp - by Jim Tilley (Paperback)

About the Book

"In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home--to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we've all shared and bring perspective to how lessons from summer camp often become apparent only later in life. "--

Book Synopsis

In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home--to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we've all shared and bring perspective to how lessons from summer camp often become apparent only later in life.

Review Quotes

"Jim Tilley's Lessons from Summer Camp would make Wordsworth proud since it is affection recollected in tranquility. Boys leave a ceremonial world of finger sandwiches and afternoon tea to step into a greener and wider one. There Tilley and his friends learn the value and limitations of teamwork and play games that sort out leaders from followers. As sunlit as these poems can be, a prescient and observant Tilley also finds that sometimes life is 'always a night in the wilderness.' On a canoe trip he hears two loons calling, one as if lost, the other answering, 'I'm over here' as the author himself searches for his place in the world." --Ron Koertge

"Reading this book is like returning to those sometimes fraught but mostly carefree days of summer camp--or, for the uninitiated among us, like taking our blindfolds off and discovering that vivid world for the first time. Tilley's poems are refreshingly direct, maybe because, as he says in 'J-Stroke and Sweep, ' 'You can't see the metaphor when you're a Camper.' He sees the metaphors now but doesn't bear down on them too hard, and the 'lessons' of the title never seem forced. Jim Tilley earns a '3rd feather' for this third book."

--Jeffrey Harrison

About the Author

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. Hispoetry collections include In Confidence (2011) and Cruising at Sixty to Seventy (2014), both from Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, has appeared as a Ploughshares Solo e-book, an audiobook through Audible.com, and in a Ploughshares print anthology. His poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily and on the PBS News Hour's art blog, among others, and has won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.