Lockdown Letters & Other Poems

Opening with a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lockdown Letters & Other Poems ranges near and far in the author’s catalogue.

While spared the devastating effects of the disease, he offers a view of the way daily life changes and new risks are confronted as people try to maintain routines.

The book shifts to work inspired by travel—local, global, and beyond—routes giving rise to memorable observations and insights.

More place poems and a cycle of sports pieces round out the volume, with its theme of home-and-away.

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. With Tina Neylon and John Wooding, he edited Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (2020), featuring writers from Ireland and America. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indiana; Café Review in Portland, Maine; PoetsReadingtheNews.org, a national online publication; SpoKe Seven, a Boston-based poetry annual; Résonance, a Franco-American journal at UMaine Orono; and Merrimack Valley Magazine. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.