Rhymes of the Antipodes

About the Book

These poems are inspired by the natural beauty and wildlife of three areas where the author has grown up and lived in retirement: rural Massachusetts, the coast of Maine, “wild and wonderful” West Virginia, and the South Island of New Zealand. He refers to these spots as the antipodes – two places on opposite sides of the earth. Although they are ten thousand miles apart and in different hemispheres, he finds similarities, as noted in the final section, particularly between places in New England and New Zealand. He also points out that by living this antipodean lifestyle one avoids winter and enjoys eternal summer.

About the Author

Peter Lord is a native New Englander who grew up north of Boston in a nineteenth-century family home in Boxford Village, where he attended a two-room grade school in the 1940s. His family summered on the coast of Maine at Treetop on Little Cranberry Island, where the close-knit winter and summer residents met daily at the combined Islesford Post Office and general store. After a career in the U.S. Foreign Service, he moved in retirement to a retreat built earlier on Shavers Fork near Elkins, WV, where he and his wife, Suzanne, live from May to October. From November to April they can be found on Trewavas St. in Motueka at the top of the South Island in New Zealand. That’s where he began writing verse in meter and rhyme, the old-fashioned way, inspired by Robert Frost and by Frank Soper, a neighboring Kiwi poet and farmer in Golden Bay. Alternating between West Virginia and New Zealand, the Lords enjoy summer year-round and avoid the cold New England winters found in Boxford and Hingham, MA, where Suzanne grew up on Otis Street along Hingham harbor.