Praise for Mianus Village
Jack T. Scully's Mianus Village both celebrates and mourns the loss of American innocence, decency, humor, and family life. The poetry here is lucid and straightforward, and the spirit of the book is that of recalling the "forgotten debris of forgotten years." A reader feels refreshed and grateful for what Jack Scully has accomplished in these pages.
—David Huddle, Emeritus Professor, University of Vermont; Author of Paper Boy and My Surly Heart
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Jack T. Scully captures the true grit of post-World War Two America in Mianus Village—a Veterans' enclave of 40 tiny homes—nestled along the banks of the Mianus River in Riverside, Connecticut.
The lives of Scully’s fellow-villagers, told in 36-Free Verse poems, have universal themes that will resonate with The Greatest Generation, Boomers, and their families in Everytown, USA.
It was a time of idealism and hope, tempered by bare-knuckle realities and survival.
Stayin’ Alive, if you will, for the Beat Generation.
Populated by returning low-to-no-money GIs, wives, children, dogs, and cats, Mianus Village is brimming with behind-closed-doors tales—some heartwarming, others heartbreaking.
Scully has intimate knowledge of Village secrets; young friends, it appears, have no trouble “airing laundry”—be it clean or dirty.
Every verse conjures a vivid, new image.
Writing with ease and comfort, the author beckons us to join him for an authentic, yet sentimental, but never sappy, return to his Memory Lane.
So it goes, well-told recollections—in free verse—of life for a Baby Boomer in the back-then hood.
Mianus Village was well worth my time. I hope you find it worth your time too.
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—J. Chris Davala, TV & Radio Broadcaster; President of SMARTALK, Inc.
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Jack T. Scully is going to sit you down in the easy chair of your mind. With metric simplicity and an uncanny choice of evocative words, Scully will take you to Mianus Village—a real place for sure, and the setting for many autobiographical tales, but also a place that is emblematic of the commonalities within all of us … For those of an age, there is a universality and nostalgia to the tapestry he weaves. Whether it is fretting over the fear of “lockjaw” when you first heard about it at age six, or pounding a baseball to pieces until it trails threads like a jellyfish, Scully hits his own home run in Mianus Village, while taking us on a leisurely jog around its bases.
—Peter Shea, Outdoor Writer and Cartographer, Author of Long Trail Trout, Collateral Trout, and the Award-Winning Guidebook, Access America: An Atlas and Guide to the National Parks for Visitors With Disabilities.
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As a scientist, I have never understood poetry.
But I sure understand what Jack T Scully is saying in his melancholic woebegone memoir of life as a blue-collar child in Riverside, Connecticut,
on the lazy dangerous shore of the Mianus slough. In a spot of Post War Purgatory, and which is now one of the wealthiest burgs of this country.
Jack as a child appears to have missed the good fortune of this latter day capital wealth. But he clearly developed a different and deeper wealth, which he has gifted us in his moving collection of poems.
For forty years I have cried ten times. At the time mark of his penultimate lyric passages, the eleventh washed over me.
Thanks, Jack.
—James Fallon, Emeritus Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.
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Jack T. Scully has written one of the best books of poetry I have ever encountered, and I’m an editor, so I encounter a lot!
This gem of a book is like sharing life with a friend, rewarding, warm, revealing, funny, insightful. Scully’s imagery and detail are easy to read, accessible, and yet surprising and “just the right way” to get his point across.
He has a knack for telling a story [the book is a series of narrative poems about growing up in this river-side town in Connecticut some few years ago], and then he drops in a little surprise here and there, not so much about what happened, but in the way he experienced it. Delightful!
For instance, talking about watching Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural address on TV when Scully was about four-years-old [his mother wanted him to experience history], he writes:
“Ike, as mother called him, / was bald and serious / and talked long enough / for me to eat a box / of animal crackers / and fall asleep.”
Through the entire wonderful poem, I did not expect that, but it was perfect — I remember boxes of animal crackers and how slowly Ike spoke, and I knew immediately what that moment was like for Jack Scully.
The book is full of little bits and surprises like that, some just the right word, some the image, some the long story coming to a fruitful end. Read about the neighborhood changing … you will feel something. Better yet, read the whole book.
—Pat Goudey O'Brien, Former President of the League of Vermont Writers, Consulting Editor, Writing Coach, and Author
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“We kept our distance
from the junk man,
who had more tattoos than teeth”
Jack T. Scully's past occupations as a journalist and a successful tech entrepreneur appear to have sharpened his marketing skills: The Colchester author promotes his latest book with an informative website and video. Both give the impression that Mianus Village is yet another boomer memoir about growing up in a more "innocent" time.
And it is — to a point. Scully was raised in a development of "40 matchbox houses" built for World War II vets and their young families in Riverside, Conn. But this collection of poems isn't just rosy nostalgia for a "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer life.”
With adult retrospection, Scully weaves in his growing awareness of poverty and racism, alcoholism and abuse, and the contamination of his beloved Mianus River. He shows us the buried sorrow of housewives and the national trauma of an assassination:
I sat there biting my lip,
praying
Our silver-tongued young president
Was just wounded
Written in straightforward but vivid free verse, Mianus Village surprises with its eloquence.
— Pamela Polston, Co-Founder & Art Editor SEVEN DAYS, Vermont’s Independent Voice and Weekly Newspaper
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