Down Stranger Roads

by Roger Craik

No one sounds like Roger Craik. His voice, a beguilingly cosmopolitan mix of British purebred and American mutt, is the well-stamped passport he shows at border crossings from Ashtabula to Auschwitz, from Kent State to Krakow, from Amsterdam to the far-flung outposts of the human heart. This poet is most at home when far from home, prowling the shrapneled boondocks and scrap yards of Cold War history. His poems are pungent as a supper of pork and tripe and boiled cabbage, washed down with a few dark pints of the local brew. A true sojourner, he is one of our finest singers of the quiet elations and solitary illuminations of travel. —George B. Bilgere, author of The White Museum which was awarded the 2009 Autumn House Poetry Prize. What sets Roger Craik’s body of work apart from that of so many contemporaries is the quality of its savoring, the sense that human experience in all its complexity is richly rewarding when we attend to it with a keen eye and an open heart. Therein lies the unity behind these wide-ranging, varied lyrics. Whether the poem looks to the past or lives in the immediate, whether its setting is local or takes us to a foreign space, whether its tone is celebratory or elegiac, whether it is intimate or broaches the broader, public world, in each case it conveys the impression of an abiding sustenance for the spirit in our everyday lives. And that impression is subtly but unmistakably strengthened by the care with which Craik uses language and savors its possibilities. All of which means that the final savoring is ours, the readers’, each time we take up and linger over this marvelous collection. Steven Reese, author of American Dervish."

102 pages, Paperback

Published December 19, 2013

About the author

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, has written four collections of poetry: I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003), The Darkening Green (2004), and Down Stranger Roads (2014), along with two chapbooks, Those Years (2007), (translated into Bulgarian in 2009), and Of England Still (2009). His poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals, such as The Formalist, Fulcrum, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, The London Grip and The London Magazine.

English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton, he has worked as a journalist, TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, South Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Bulgaria (where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship), the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Croatia and Romania, (where from 2013-14 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oradea).

He is glad every day that he is living in the USA. He watches the birds throughout the year, with joy.