A Childhood in the Milky Way: Becoming a Poet in Ohio

Since I have been a friend of the author, it provided some clues for me as to the origins of his unique personality, but likewise obscured (or referred obliquely) to some of his more curious and no doubt equally fundamental traits. Perhaps contrary to his central premise, the book demonstrates that artists are either born to insight, aloofness, solitude, singularity, uniqueness (take your pick) or, at least, become that way before they are aware of it. Hopes seems to have been a poet from his earliest memory, and it has influenced everything since; I would not credit or fault Akron, Ohio, nor would I invoke the holy spirit. No doubt that spirit (in whatever denomination) exists in all artists. As a result, I viewed the book as a special insight on what it means to Hopes to have been a poet growing up in a fairly unartistic community. I am glad to say Hopes did not bemoan any difficulties he must have experienced as a child in Akron, but instead shows us how his insights developed and were nurtured and tuned.

Hopes slices through his particular, peculiar boyhood down to a quirky, abyssal holiness in Akron, of all places, in the shadows of the rubber industry and a mile high glacier. He transforms Goodyear Heights Metropolitan Park into his "Maytree," a real madeup place where the Mother of Turtles lived and his sister became the Red Dancer, defiance herself rising and wheeling in the bitter rain. Here are the beginnings of a poet and a fierce worshipper of the things of a world most of us do not see, a glimpse of which he brings forth for us here. His prose is slick and quick as a slim-jim. He opens doors to places most of us never knew were there.

This book is a moving, remarkably eloquent memoir, an extended autobiographical essay that describes the author, the poet David Hopes. It is so beautifully written that it is almost a kind of poem. Highly recommended!