Counting Bricks explores the role of family in one's life; is a gift in many ways: generous, heart -felt, sensitive, compassionate, sweeter than sweet, rough as a working man's hands, and sometimes tougher than nails. The poems, individually and collectively, are a poignant testimony to family, its beauties and faults, its muscular heroisms, foibles, weaknesses; all of it realistically expressed in verse, but underlaid at all points with affection.
Counting Bricks contains 45 poems, along with a 10-part long poem. Forty-one poems were first published in various magazines and reviews, including The Amherst Review, Chiron Review, English Journal, 5 AM, Poetry East, and Veterans for Peace Newsletter; four were reprinted in anthologies; nine poems were selected from the author's earlier chapbooks (The Yearnings and Today's Lesson); the long sequence poem, Seagull Beach, was published as a limited edition chapbook.
Counting Bricks is divided into five numbered sections: 1. poems range from a young boy's memory of physical pain to re-examining the meaning and lessons of Memorial Day from a personal perspective; included are two long poems, the first, "Children of the Projects," is full of snippets of experiences and memories of growing up in a public housing project in the 1950s and 60s; the other long poem, this collection's title poem, depicts, without obvious emotions, the author's father's family (from the book's cover photo) and how the father fit within the fourteen siblings.
Section 2.: The emotions and fears of the groom at his wedding; the perspective of a husband during his wife's ninth month of pregnancy; one small event as a father and how others perceive it; included are a group of poems sharing experiences of teaching high school.
Section 3.: "Seagull Beach" shares the calmness of spending time at the beach in summer and how that peacefulness, that idleness fills with memories and observations of what is around: watching a father and son playing in the water, the ever-present seagulls here and there, talking and squawking, someone's radio sparking a memory, as several other memories awaken: a failed teenage love, as juvenile tour of a factory that scares the child, a postcard found in a book bought at a used book store that inspires its own section of the longer poem.
Section 4.: "Making Pierogis" opens this section and shows a loving mother and her infant daughter; then poems lush with metaphors as a married couple grow in the routines of life amid snow, daffodils, dreams, and finishes with a mother and great-grandmother near the end of her life in language that is simple and direct to both clothe and mask the emotions of the family.
Section 5.: A dozen poems showing how young love blossoms into family and long lasting affection.
About the Author :
Gary Metras was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Easthampton, Massachusetts, appointed April 2018. He is the author of 9 previous poetry books along with 13 chapbooks. His essays, reviews, and chiefly poems have appeared in hundreds of journals such as America, American Angler, The Bellingham Review, The Boston Review of Books, California Quarterly, Cholla Needles, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Yankee and Tears in the Fence (UK). Metras is a past recipient of the Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry. He was the founder, editor and letterpress printer for 40 years of Adastra Press, which specialized in hand-crafted, limited editions of poetry. He is an avid fly fisher of the local streams and rivers for recreation and inspiration.
Review :
Critical Praise for the Poetry Books of Gary Metras
Marble Dust: "Metras employs a lyric tone that evokes the ancient world in modern times....Gary has always been an excellent poet, but this collection feels particularly fine."-Misfit MagazineVanishing Points: Selected as a Must Read Poetry Title by the Mass. Center for the Book. "Readers will be dazzled, I think, by Metras's many deft and quite moving turns of the phrase....Metras's diction and tone have the elevated dignity of the best of...Zbigniew Herbert...Czeslaw Miosz...Seamus Heaney."-The Main Street RagWhite Storm: Selected as a Must Read Poetry Title by the Mass. Center for the Book. "[H]ow words travel off the page to carry us beyond ourselves for others, a legacy of sounds we may savor and hold close in our lives. I highly recommend this collection by a poet young in his upper years."-David Giannini, Wilderness House Literary ReviewUntil There Is Nothing Left: "Metras' poems are filled with phrases that want to touch and be felt. They testify. Metras is an unpretentious writer who keeps company with readers...In fact, he's good company. His voice is direct, simple, uncomplaining and democratic." -Daily Hampshire Gazette
