With clarity, craft, and quiet power, Gregory LeStage's new collection stands firm in the lineage of American poetry that confronts memory, loss, and manhood without flinching.
In I Was a Shipwreck Scholar, LeStage writes with the assured voice of someone who knows the terrain-of fathers and sons, of New England coastlines, of things hard-won and harder to hold. These poems are forged with precision and restraint, built like seawalls against time's erosion. Whether reckoning with childhood, honoring the raw beauty of Cape Cod's coastal life, or reflecting on the failures and redemptions of adulthood, LeStage writes with the restraint of a woodworker, the curiosity of a boy among tide pools, and the strength of a man who has learned to carry weight-and put it down again.
He moves fluidly between free verse and formal structures, crafting a villanelle like "Do Not Rush the Wound to Mending" or a sonnetlike meditation such as "Kingmaker's Glass" with the same care and reverence he brings to restoring an old barn beam or rebuilding a seawall. These carefully patterned pieces are evidence of a long apprenticeship to the genre-a poet who understands that the architecture of a line can hold as much weight as the emotion within it.
These are poems that do not drift. They anchor. From the spare, architectural elegance of "Renting a Hopper House" to the mythic heft of "Shipwreck Scholar" and "The Kinship of Freefall," this collection reclaims poetry as a tool for men who feel deeply, speak honestly, and build meaning word by word.
LeStage's work reminds us that strength is not about certainty-it's about standing still in the wind, eyes open, heart steady.
