Maine poet’s latest book released

Paul Corrigan’s first poems were about childhood summers at his family’s camp at Millinocket Lake. In his latest collection of poems, “At the Grave of the Unknown Riverdriver,” a $10.95 premium trade paperback from Maine’s North Country Press, he writes, “Those early years fostered in me an appreciation of wild, unspoiled places and the people who live and work near them.”

Most of the poems in this 88-page book are tributes to the north woods and the wood polers, fire watchers, dam tenders, and river drivers of another era. The titles hint at their content: “The Camp of the Cold River Hermit” and “Crossing the Booms in Fall.” Many others explore such personal themes as “Raspberrying with My Mother” and “The Outdoor Writer in Retirement.” His “Two in an Old Canoe” is a love letter to his wife.

A section titled “Predators” offers observations on the poet’s fishing and hunting experiences in “Spent Shells,” “Dipping Smelt” and “Boone and Crockett Antler-Scoring Clinic.” In “First Deer,” which initially appeared in a 1984 chapbook, “Waiting for the Spring Freshet,” his vividly colored images and prose-poem style describe the closeness of a father and son on the occasion of the boy’s downing his first deer.

The section “The Other Shore” goes beyond physical experience, giving the reader thoughts on sleep, dreams and death in such pieces as “To a Girl Who Fell Asleep in a Hollow Tree” and “After They’ve Planted You.” Corrigan shows a darker side here, ruminating as well on ghosts, vampires and an enchanted looking glass.

Whether they are mystic ruminations or up-river elegies, Corrigan’s poems contain an uncommon sensitivity which Puckerbrush Review describes as “the constant undercurrent of love (which) brings people and places more totally alive than in any novel.”

“Twin in an Old Canoe,” also originally published in “Waiting for the Spring Freshet,” describes a north-country outing. Blueline magazine reviewer Jane Carroll writes, “This is a tough, spare book without cliches or sentimentality. For that reason, one is tempted to compare Corrigan with Robert Frost. But Corrigan seems more engaging, more human, without sacrificing reality to exaggeration.”

Corrigan has been a visiting poet for many years in upstate New York and in Maine. His summers are spent fishing, hunting, and guiding white-water rafting trips. He received his master’s degree from Brown University in creative writing and literature. He is the recipient of the Foundation Award in Writing from the State University of New York at Binghamton (1974), the Academy of American Poets Awards (Brown University, 1976), and New York State’s Creative Artist Public Service Award (1979).

He and his wife, Janice, live in Hartland.