<p>Dogtown has long provided inspiration for poets and fiction writers including early 20th century poet and playwright Percy MacKaye, who sought to create a poetic form of democratic drama for America, Gloucester s two epic poets, Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, and contemporary best-selling author Anita Diamant. A visit to Dogtown revitalized the work of the great American painter Marsden Hartley, as the two exhibits of his work by the Cape Ann Museum have shown. Until now, Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town has done the best job of weaving together the various threads that create the fabric of the experience of the place that is Dogtown, and now James Scrimgeour comes forward with the single imaginative artistic work about Dogtown that I've been waiting for. While reading James Scrimgeour's collection of Dogtown poems, I am struck by the many voices I hear, or more precisely, the voices Scrimgeour enables me to hear. Marsden Hartley characterized Dogtown as a combination of Stonehenge and Easter Island, an apt analogy that makes me realize those places that fascinate us the most harbor voices that speak to us and tell us of the numinosity of those places, that is, what makes them supernatural and mysterious. The voices in these poems of Scrimgeour's bring Dogtown alive in a multi-dimensional way that comes as close, in my judgement, as anyone has come so far to capturing the complete essence of Dogtown. When I finish reading these poems, when I have heard all the voices they contain, I think of Dogtown as if it is a sentient, breathing organism, and I marvel at my appreciation and understanding not only of the experience of Dogtown in particular, but also of the experience of place in general. In this collection of poems, we are also invited to reach out and touch Marsden Hartley, Charles Olson and all the other writers and artists inspired by Dogtown. We are invited to reach across the centuries and make the lives of Dogtowners object lessons for our own lives. We are invited to appreciate the plants and flowers of Dogtown and to understand its geology as embodied by the terminal moraine, the rocks and the boulders, and the erratics. We are invited to receive the inscribed truths that Roger Babson sought to convey. We are invited to visit Dogtown, to walk around, to experience that place for ourselves in our own way, to hear voices and to be guided by the approach taken by James Scrimgeour in this transcendent collection of poems that will take its place as a culminating work within the literature of Dogtown. -Carl Carlsen</p>

Voices of Dogtown

Literature & Fiction

James R. Scrimgeour

Poetry

Loom Press

The Route and Other Poems

Normal: Pikestaff Press

Brushstrokes of the Millennium

Western Connecticut State University Foundation

Western Connecticut State University Foundati

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Books by James R. Scrimgeour