Class Note 1952
Issue
“The Village Poet” is the honorific affectionately bestowed upon Ray Buck by his neighbors on Sanibel Island, the Edenic resort on Florida’s gulf coast where he and wife Mary now spend most of the year. He has earned this accolade through one-person public readings of his poems, many of them about Sanibel; active participation in several writer-reader workshops groups in the community; and the authorship of a series of articles and poems in the local newspaper about the island and its history, drawn from his service as a docent for the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village.
Ray came late—upon reflection, perhaps too late, he says—to poetry. From Dartmouth days through his working career at Dartmouth and the University of Connecticut his avocation was writing plays, but when an effort to dramatize the historical lifelong friendship shared by Bowdoin classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne and 14th U.S. President Franklin Pierce proved unworkable, he reorganized his research into a lengthy poem, and in the process found his new interest.
Last year he published South of Providence, a collection of nearly 100 mostly short poems inspired by family, travels in Italy and nature, both in Sanibel and Old Saybrook, Connecticut, once his full-time and still his summer home. The volume also includes a lengthy segment from his Hawthorne-Pierce epic. He still writes prolifically and looks forward to publishing a new selection in 2012.
With Ray’s permission, we have posted on our class website (www.dartmouth.org/classes/52) a recent work, “Gentle Mountain,” in which he recalls and reflects about an adventure he shared with Neal Kelsey and Jay Stahl during a weekend Outing Club brush-clearing trip to Mt. Moosilauke in the fall of our freshman year.
On another topic, there have also been posted on the website brief summaries of the projects undertaken by the class of 1952 Tucker Foundation Fellows for 2008-09 and 2009-10 (two each year). They range geographically from Nepal and Beijing in Asia to Cape Town and Ethiopia in Africa, and for the most part involve working with needy children.
—Dave Drexler, 1706 N. Park Drive, Wilmington, DE 19806; (302) 428-0398; dave@drexlercom
July - Aug 2010
“The Village Poet” is the honorific affectionately bestowed upon Ray Buck by his neighbors on Sanibel Island, the Edenic resort on Florida’s gulf coast where he and wife Mary now spend most of the year. He has earned this accolade through one-person public readings of his poems, many of them about Sanibel; active participation in several writer-reader workshops groups in the community; and the authorship of a series of articles and poems in the local newspaper about the island and its history, drawn from his service as a docent for the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village.
Ray came late—upon reflection, perhaps too late, he says—to poetry. From Dartmouth days through his working career at Dartmouth and the University of Connecticut his avocation was writing plays, but when an effort to dramatize the historical lifelong friendship shared by Bowdoin classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne and 14th U.S. President Franklin Pierce proved unworkable, he reorganized his research into a lengthy poem, and in the process found his new interest.
Last year he published South of Providence, a collection of nearly 100 mostly short poems inspired by family, travels in Italy and nature, both in Sanibel and Old Saybrook, Connecticut, once his full-time and still his summer home. The volume also includes a lengthy segment from his Hawthorne-Pierce epic. He still writes prolifically and looks forward to publishing a new selection in 2012.
With Ray’s permission, we have posted on our class website (www.dartmouth.org/classes/52) a recent work, “Gentle Mountain,” in which he recalls and reflects about an adventure he shared with Neal Kelsey and Jay Stahl during a weekend Outing Club brush-clearing trip to Mt. Moosilauke in the fall of our freshman year.
On another topic, there have also been posted on the website brief summaries of the projects undertaken by the class of 1952 Tucker Foundation Fellows for 2008-09 and 2009-10 (two each year). They range geographically from Nepal and Beijing in Asia to Cape Town and Ethiopia in Africa, and for the most part involve working with needy children.
—Dave Drexler, 1706 N. Park Drive, Wilmington, DE 19806; (302) 428-0398; dave@drexlercom