Inspiration rooted in Plymouth

David Roderick , author of a new book of poems lauded by reviewers as purposeful, even extraordinary, launched his book tour recently in Plymouth, the town where he grew up, appearing in the public library where he learned to love books. And why not: Roderick's hometown also is the setting for his book, "Blue Colonial," which was awarded first place last year in a contest judged by Robert Pinksy , the former US poet laureate who remains one of America's most respected and popular poets.

The poems in "Blue Colonial," published by the American Poetry Review as the prize for winning its ninth annual Honickman First Book Prize, deal with the difficulty of knowing the past, Pinsky says in his introduction to Roderick's poems. Even if the truth about the past is that so much is lost " we become somewhat lost ourselves in what remains," this difficulty is "engaged, not erased" in Roderick's "extraordinary" poems, Pinsky writes.

Roderick, 36 , has come a long away as a poet in a short time.

"Poetry was difficult for me," and studying it at school a "mystifying" and "futile" experience, he said last month. It was only when he became a teacher and determined that his middle school students would not have the same experience that he revisited the literature and discovered that, with patience, he was able to absorb and respond to poetry. Under the influence of his newfound pleasure, he cut one of his stories down to a single page and thought, "Maybe this is a poem. Things clicked," he said.

Another factor kick-starting him as a poet, Roderick said, was his parents' decision eight or nine years ago to build a house off Billington Street in an old section of Plymouth. He watched the stages of the construction process -- clearing the land, framing the building -- and walked in the woods behind the house. "The process got me thinking of the place and Billington Street," a street named after a Pilgrim, Roderick said. "It got me curious and stimulated my imagination."

The resulting poems expressed a kind of double vision of the Plymouth landscape, the Plymouth where the Pilgrims had built their settlement in the wilderness, and the place where even today people build their houses among the trees. Reviewers of "Blue Colonial" have praised the poems' treatment of "the intersection between history and memory." The collection's title suggests that intersection, naming a common style of New England house while also alluding to the region's early colonial days.

Growing interested in the Pilgrims as his family built a new house on an old road, Roderick read "Of Plimoth Plantation ," Governor William Bradford 's account of the colony's early days, and was impressed by the rigor of 17th-century existence. "You couldn't be a Pilgrim and also be a sissy," he told his audience at Plymouth library last month.

But the poems in "Blue Colonial" wander freely from the historical record. Roderick said he has taken liberties and imagined a kind of minority report on the colony's early days. Along with a poem picturing Bradford at work on his journal before dawn, with candle and goose quill pen ("Poor William Bradford, who knows nothing/ about the imagination,/ just a string of facts he can't quite recall"), he also writes about John Billington , Bradford's antagonist, whose son stumbled upon a broad pond and thought it was the ocean. (The pond still bears the name "Billington Sea.")

Roderick's poem "John Billington's Conversion " imagines the dissident colonial's desire to learn how to live with the land as did the Native American Squanto , "that wayfarer who squats at the bank and hunts the shallows for fish."

Roderick's poems also feature a contemporary voice, which he described as "a solitary person living in contemporary Plymouth and thinking about that legacy and how it impacts his life."

That person bears some resemblance to the poet: "I still carry this town with me," Roderick said.

Roderick doesn't live in Plymouth now; he is a writer in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .

After attending Colby College in Maine, Roderick earned a master's degree in fine arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst . He has taught at a private secondary school, the University of San Francisco, and Stanford University . Until "Blue Colonial," he had published poems in "The Hudson Review ," "The Missouri Review, " and "New England Review, " among other periodicals.

He worked on the poems collected in "Blue Colonial" for five or six years, he told listeners in Plymouth, some of them going through 30 to 40 drafts. He took part in groups where writers critique each other's work and continues to get feedback from writing friends. "You need the outside perspective," he said.

Though his vocation has taken him to other parts of the country, Plymouth still feels like home, Roderick said, particularly in autumn, an evocative time of year for him.

"I walk down the driveway, smell something, and remember that smell from being a kid," he said. After living in California and missing fall, he said, he watches the coats of the deer near his parents' house grow darker and darker as the season advances and feels "more like I'm home."

Roderick's recent tour included readings in Worcester and Amherst. He will be back in town next spring -- if not before -- for a reading at Pilgrim Hall on March 25 . "Blue Colonial" is available through the website davidroderick.net .

Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@gmail.com.