Book Review: The Saugus Book

Title: The Saugus Book 

Author: Thomas F. Sheehan

Date: 1984

Publisher: Golden Quill

ISBN 0-8233-0388-8

Length; 134 pages

Quote: "Sheehan, reluctant at trigger pull, dreamer..."

In the last and longest poem in this book Sheehan describes himself, or at least his younger self, a soldier in the Korean war in 1951. Even here the subject of the poem is not so much himself, though, as his differences from two buddies and his bond with them. This is not an overly introspective book, despite occasional insights into the poet's psyche.

Primarily this book delivers what its title promises. Taken as a whole, this book is a tribute to the town of Saugus, at the northeastern corner of Massachusetts; its scenery, its people, its industry.

It could also be described in terms like "The Manly Art of Poetry." Sheehan's generation hadn't heard that poetry was something women did better than men. They assumed men would do poetry better than women and, though mostly untrue, this belief liberated them to write as well as they could, and gave modern poets more topics to write about.

Some of Sheehan's poems describe the same Atlantic beaches with the same focus on visual details that I associate with early Sylvia Plath. Whether her poems were "better" is a matter of literary opinion as well as any resonance in thought created by gender. I prefer Plath's beach poems because they are sound-conscious enough that I hear them as poems; I call Sheehan's pieces poems because he does, out of courtesy, but I hear them as well-polished prose. Other comparisons with Plath come to mind (they were born about the same time, though Sheehan lived longer, and in the same part of the country; they studied the same poems and poets at school). Each wrote a long poem for three voices. Plath's was a long conversation set in a maternity ward. Sheehan's is a set of three short stories told by each of three soldiers in Korea. If you like understatement and detachment, you'd prefer Sheehan's three-voice poem.

The difference is not so much that one poem or poet is better so much as that Sheehan chose different topics than Plath did. Both poets wrote about New England landscapes. Sheehan also writes about drinking with male friends in pubs, about spending daddy-time with his children, about minerals, architecture, carpentry, and of course about the war...about his experience of life as a man. 

There's emotionality (a man at a grave mourns "Spring from the grave, James! / Spring! Spring! Oh James, come up," and Sheehan says in his own voice "And I am a brother to all who are dead. / We all wear the rags of war") but Sheehan seems to have learned the valuable skill of routing thoughts through the logical part of his brain and thus withholding energy from his emotions. In the real world I see this detachment as correlated with age, not with gender; for me the (young) female hormone cycle was an incentive to cultivate detachment, but Sheehan's generation liked to think of it as a male thing.

If I'm belaboring this point, it's for The Nephews and any other young men who may read this review. We live in a strange time for male poets. After getting out of schoolrooms where they were constantly struggling to keep up with the faster-growing girls, encountering a "guy culture" (especially the "Black guy culture") of encouragement to give up any interest in writing or poetry as being female things, they now get onto mailing lists that relay calls for content to female, ethnic-minority, or sexuality-identified writers, but no interest in anything White male writers might produce. The publishers already have their lists of White male writers. They all have somebody like John Grisham or James Patterson or Neil Gaiman as a flagship author they spend all kinds of time and effort to keep in the headlines, a dozen or so other male writers who are successful enough to inherit the flagship position if necessary, a felt need to wave about books by writers in the categories that used to be discriminated against, and neither space nor energy left over for encouraging new White male writers. White male poets? Surely you jest. They had a few of those on their lists, Randall Jarrell, Ted Hughes, but who's gone into a bookstore and asked for one of their books lately? Dead White male poets fill up most of the required reading lists; that they do is partly due to discrimination in their favor, so heavenforbidandfend anybody should encourage a living White male poet. It might look like more discrimination.

This does not mean that White male poets, like Sheehan, don't have things to say, contributions to make to English Literature. It merely means that they now have to work harder than everyone else does to persuade the world to listen to what they have to say. And it's worth the effort. The world needs poems about construction work as much as it needs poems about paintings in museums.

The Saugus Book has been out long enough to be offered free on Kindle as a sort of trailer for Sheehan's more recent books. He is now 93 years old and still writing poems. You'll probably enjoy them.