Lessons from Summer Camp [Paperback]

In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home—to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we’ve all shared and bring perspective to how lessons from summer camp often become apparent only later in life.

“Reading this book is like returning to those sometimes fraught but mostly carefree days of summer camp—or, for the uninitiated among us, like taking our blindfolds off and discovering that vivid world for the first time. Tilley’s poems are refreshingly direct, maybe because, as he says in ‘J-Stroke and Sweep,’ ‘You can’t see the metaphor when you’re a Camper.’ He sees the metaphors now but doesn’t bear dolóå