In the Northwest and around the Pacific Rim, Tom Sexton is known as a premier poet of the natural world, from birds to mountains. But there's another side to this writer, a deep investigator and lyrical beat reporter whose subject is his working-class, ethnic-American hometown where he's returned regularly, sometimes anonymously to better absorb the facts and fill the blotter at the night desk in the hall of records. The poems he's drawn from memory and recent inspection stand for the experience of a thousand small industrial cities that were made by immigrants and often got knocked down by merciless economic winds, only to get their legs back under them and move forward. As universal as they may be, places like Lowell need a literature to call their own.
