Things Haven't Been the Same

A collection of poems.

Ralph Stevens, known locally as "Skip," lives on a Maine coastal island, a small one, in a town of about 60 year-round residents. "Year-round" because there's another group, the "summer people" of folks who come to the coast when school lets out, tripling or quadrupling the size of Islesford, as the island village is known. It's hard to determine the effect of this seasonal dynamic on poetry and the creative arts but Little Cranberry Island, like the better-known Monhegan, and as with the Maine coast generally, is a place where the arts thrive. The art of painting primarily, and primarily in the plein aire of summer, but also a little poetry. Stevens has done most of his work as a poet in response to this environment of granite, spruce forest and the Atlantic Ocean. And in response to a community that seems to whisper "let's make something" be it a painting, a play, a song, beautiful pottery. Or a poem. Stevens arrived on Little Cranberry from Baltimore where he was on the faculty of Coppin State University as an English professor. The surge in online education allowed him to move while holding his faculty position and continuing to teach. Now retired, he devotes more time to looking for poems. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of the collection At Bunker Cove. His poems have appeared in The Seattle Times, Crab Creek Review, The Lyric, The Maryland Review, The Christian Century, Verse-Virtual, The Island Reader, and on the radio programs, The Writer's Almanac and Poems from Here. Stevens is still developing an online presence and can currently be found on Facebook, and YouTube as Ralph Skip Stevens, https: //www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8ighMHY9S27GOm9qOTenw