Stephen Scaer of Nashua, NH, is a special education teacher with poems published in National Review, First Things, Cricket, and Highlights for Children. Pumpkin Chucking was a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award.
Right from the opening sonnet in Pumpkin Chucking, the poignant
"Hannah at Ten," you'll recognize Scaer as an outstanding lyric
poet. But the prevailing voice in this collection belongs to a
hugely entertaining, middle-aged, middle-class Everyman writing
about the everyday. Take the lifeguard, sung in Old-English-style
alliterative meter-"whistle-whirler," "Thane of the Poconos." Or
the Hercules who can divert rivers into Augean stables with no
hassles from the EPA. (And both of these pale compared to Scaer's
"Classical Limericks.") Some of the poems are exquisitely lyrical:
"Light Box," "Raspberry Patch," "Long Trail." Still, what you take
away from the book is Scaer's deadpan humor-a wit that's wicked but
not mean. Often as not, the speaker is himself the target. And the
more the guy makes fun of himself, the more we love him. He speaks
for us all.-Deborah Warren
Stephen Scaer's Pumpkin Chucking celebrates the New England
landscape while still being universal . . . and it surprises us
with wit in the winking way of Frost.-A.M. Juster (from the
foreword)
A collection with a range of forms as broad as Stephen Scaer's
Pumpkin Chucking can read like an exercise book-or like a tour of
the expressive possibilities of all of English poetry. This book is
decisively the latter. From the delightful "Mid-Life Limericks" to
the modern idiom shaped to Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in
"Wendell," each poem feels utterly natural, utterly native to the
form. And don't miss "Sarcasm," a sonnet that deftly recasts
Petrarch's jewels of transcendent love as stones that wound both
lover and beloved.-Richard Wakefield
This is a wonderful and entertaining book of poetry. Stephen
Scaer's poems are full of wit, sarcasm and humor. His subjects are
familiar to many of us: parenting, tedious jobs, home repair,
dealing with middle age. But his well-crafted verse-the rhymes
alone are worth the price of admission-is much more than that.
Reading the poems, I was reminded of the voice of Screwtape
dispensing advice to his devil-in-training nephew in C.S. Lewis's
The Screwtape Letters: the humor is aimed directly at that familiar
reflection in the mirror. When I was done reading and admiring
these poems, I was left feeling like the narrator standing by his
grill smoking a rack of ribs in Scaer's "The Sacrifice of Cain" "I
wish I were a better man."-Robert Crawford
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