{"id":5863,"date":"2015-02-13T14:17:35","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T19:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/?p=5863"},"modified":"2015-02-13T14:17:35","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T19:17:35","slug":"eric-trethewey-1943-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/eric-trethewey-1943-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Trethewey, 1943 &#8211; 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5865 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/eric-trethewey.jpg\" alt=\"Eric Trethewey\" width=\"275\" height=\"220\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/eric-trethewey.jpg 275w, https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/eric-trethewey-250x200.jpg 250w, https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/eric-trethewey-195x155.jpg 195w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/>Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Eric &#8220;Rick&#8221; Peter Trethewey hitchhiked, at 17, to Kentucky State College after being awarded a full scholarship for track and field. Trethewey was a great sampler of life, and his unofficial r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes his work as lead singer of a band, songwriter and guitarist, reporter, longshoreman, and Louisiana Golden Gloves boxer\u2014a light heavy-weight who threw a mighty punch. A veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy, Trethewey had a sense of mirth that existed tenuously, a slight notch above his profound sense of the necessity for righting wrongs. All of his life experiences richly influenced his well-respected poems, essays, and stories.<\/p>\n<p>Trethewey earned a B.A. from Kentucky State College, an M.A. from the University of New Orleans, and a Ph.D. from Tulane University. He joined the Hollins faculty in 1985 and enjoyed a distinguished career as an author and an educator. His five acclaimed collections of poems include <em>Dreaming of Rivers, Evening Knowledge<\/em> (winner of the 1990 Virginia Prize in Poetry), <em>The Long Road Home, Songs &amp; Lamentations, <\/em>and <em>Heart&#8217;s Hornbook<\/em>. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. <em>The Home Waltz<\/em>, a screenplay, won the Virginia Governor&#8217;s Screenplay Competition in 1988.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014From the memorial service program, September 13, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4591\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave.png\" alt=\"divider\" width=\"645\" height=\"26\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave.png 645w, https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave-250x10.png 250w, https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave-640x26.png 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 645px) 100vw, 645px\" \/><\/p>\n<h4>Frost on the Fields<\/h4>\n<p>so heavy it looks like snow at first.<br \/>\nAnd ice at the edge of the pond, in ditches too.<br \/>\nEverything contracts outside and inside:<br \/>\nsky the cold steel of November,<br \/>\none more November starving what lives on warmth,<br \/>\nthe year gone gaunt with it, the pastures brown,<br \/>\nbrown the hillsides and the trees emptied of leaves,<br \/>\nthe last of them swept off in a river of wind.<\/p>\n<p>Later, walking, I see the frost has melted.<br \/>\nBut the day\u2019s hard light does not relent,<br \/>\nreveals all that it touches in keen-edged clarity,<br \/>\neven sodden leaves in the ditches,<br \/>\na lash of dark birds flicking above the landscape,<br \/>\nbleached grass hugging the earth\u2019s skull.<br \/>\nAn oak leaf still stemmed to a branch tugs away<br \/>\nand sinks on the air, the landscape\u2019s last lowered flag.<br \/>\nHunkered on a post, a turkey buzzard<br \/>\nflaps into ungainly flight as I pass.<\/p>\n<p>Why are we not better than we are?<br \/>\nAll around me the dead leaves lie.<br \/>\nThe day exhales one last breeze, subsides<br \/>\nto a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet<br \/>\npalpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Trethewey<br \/>\nFrom <em>Songs &amp; Lamentations<\/em>, 2004, WordTech Imprint, Cincinnati, Ohio<\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A remembrance of Eric Trethewey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-5863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winter-2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5863"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5936,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863\/revisions\/5936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}