Sams Book [Paperback]

When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam’s Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam’s lifetime. “How should I mourn?” David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam’s first bath, a “holy/Rite”; tying the shoelaces of the “little man”; traveling to Greece, where Sam is “the first…/to see the holy moon.” With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son’s blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a “love nest.” Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam’s Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.Eloquent and accessible poems commemorating the “stunning blast” of loss

Praying for Signs
The Snapshots
Teaching
In the Gallery Room
Son
The Apple That Fills the Room
For Samuel Cyrus Ray 6/6/65
At the Washing of My Son
The Shoelaces
A Polaroid on the Porch
Calabria
In Greece
The Temple at Paestum
In the Evening
For My Son
Innocents Abroad
Statues
The Iowa Farmhouse
The Old Days
The Night Sam and Wes Stayed in Their Own Hotel Room
The Father
A Visit to Amana
Thanksgiving in Sioux City
The Visit
How to Be Loved
Ropewalk
When My Children Left for the Alps
The Witness
End of the Road
Thanks, Robert Frost
On the Photograph “Yarn Mill,” by Lewis W. Hine
Scroll
Burial
Treasuring the Snapshot
Neighbors
Mom
Not at All
In the Third Month
Ghosts
At the Opera
First Snow
Sam
A Plastic Cube
Thanksgiving 1984
The Weeping Session in Italy
Brief Song
Haiku
The Birth of Woe
Beads, Pony, Prayer
The Question
Between Alp and Sea
Regrets
The Search
In the Children̵lp