Remarks by Award Sponsor, Helen Marie Casey:

It is my very great honor and pleasure to welcome and to introduce our finalist for this year's poetry award of the Boston Authors Club, Gregory LeStage. 

Gregg's collection, Hope Is A Small Barn, is a pleasure for so many reasons, not least of which is the beautiful literary allusiveness throughout the book. Take, for example the title: Hope Is A Small Barn. It is no accident that the ear recalls Emily Dickinson's Hope Is the Thing With Feathers that begins this way:

"Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—

So, from the very start, the poet is having fun with us and hopes that we are listening carefully.

In the Preface to his collection, Gregg provided a kind of Ars Poetica that I want to share with you because it reflects on the Boston Authors Club as well as other poetry-oriented organizations:

I acknowledge any organization whose fundamental belief is that Words Matter. When combined into a poem, they can matter powerfully and beautifully. They move us to think, feel and act. To understand each other. At the present time in our country's history, I believe this matters more than ever before.

Gregg's poems sing the tune with words so deftly chosen they are mesmerizing. Because we have too little time, I want to honor Gregg and share the pleasure that only poetry can give by reading the beginning of the poem, "I Was So Ten," which gleefully "channels" Dylan Thomas with all the lilt of language in full swing. The poem evidences both a command of form and voice and is a pure delight:

I Was so Ten

I was so ten then –
bicycled, ram handle-barred, ten-speeded,
summering my way towards a not-far town.
    My very setting out
startled all the world’s spheres into motion,
so great was my journey.
I wheeled my hill-conquering route
under a twisting ribbon of starlings
blue angeling,
under seagulls bannering my name,
under wished-for weather
that mothered the salt pond and river.

    Passing cars heroed
me with wide berth and handwaves, the roadside
bursting with bittersweet as I ivied
along and spooked egrets
ichabodding in eel grass. In earshot
were the hull-clapping bay,
the catboats mewling at moorings.
I rolled in the shower of my days, rays
or rain, coasted
into the general store for barrel-big
pickles and listening in
on the lilting lie traders just up

    from the boatyard with
fresh tales of fish, fuel and wind. Only ice
cream parlor between me and the white church
federating whitely
at the crossroads, its headstones lichened and
lined up in parables…

Please help me to honor and welcome Gregory LeStage…