Retired Teacher Publishes Collection of Sonnets

Former Bucks County Poet Laureate and retired George School English teacher Terence (Terry) Culleton’s third collection of poems, A Tree and Gone, is now out through Future Cycle Press. The cover art is by Nita C. Lescher ’70.

A Tree and Gone is a collection of fifty-four English sonnets divided into three sections. Each section explores aspects of our relationship to ourselves and the natural world. According to Terry, “This book has been fifteen years in the making. It’s nice to have reached closure on it and to be able to share it with others.”

“In our time,” Terry said, “Everything seems mediated by the competing interests of money, politics, vague spiritual yearnings, and something we call empirical truth. These poems try to capture moments in which we intuit the irreducibility of our inner life.”

Many of the sonnets in A Tree and Gone have been featured in publications nationally and in the U.K. One of them, Fudge Shop, won First Honorable Mention in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Traditional Sonnet Contest.  Several more are coming out this spring and summer in Avatar Review and Birmingham Journal of the Arts.

“They’ve had some success out there, which is nice,” Terry notes. “I’m glad there’s still some room in the world for traditional forms. Some folks think traditional forms are old-fashioned. I worked pretty hard, though, to make these as conversational as I could. I think that’s why so many of them found places in contemporary reviews. Editors don’t want work that seems out-of-date.”

A Tree and Gone is available in Kindle and print format through FutureCycle Press as well as on www.terenceculletonpoetry.com.