The Loss of the Schooner KESTREL

About the Book

The Loss of the Schooner Kestrel & Other Poems is a contemporary book of sea poetry based on recreational boating and commercial fishing. The boats in Dey’s poems are many and varied, and he writes about them in both literal and figurative ways. He regards yachts not as images of conspicuous consumption but as vehicles of trial and transport, and in this he is revolutionary. He sees them in the continuum of ships. The title poem is a narrative about the predicament of a modern sailor in a traditional battle against an ageless sea.

About the Author

RICHARD DEY was graduated from Harvard College where he studied under Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop, and was Poetry Editor of The Harvard Advocate. As a young man he sailed in the schoolship Tabor Boy, out of Marion, Massachusetts. Dey has worked as a yacht skipper and crewman, commercial fisherman, journalist, editor, and as a professor of maritime literature and history along the Atlantic seaboard and Lesser Antilles. He is the author of Selected Bequia Poems, a book set in the West Indies, and Adventures in the Trade Wind, a history of yacht chartering in the West Indies.