dumbfoundry

"In June, I wrote a blog post titled 'A Bird In The Mail,' celebrating what I thought would be the beginning of a new friendship and correspondence with Bobby Swain, a poet-sculptor living in Onancock, VA.

We'd exchanged only two letters since then. And I did not know that already, he was (as his wife put it) 'in decline'... Bobby suffered a severe back injury when he was only twenty years old and in college, and has been in a wheelchair since then; and, thirteen years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Nevertheless, he never went into any of these in great detail, and instead wrote about how he got into the carving/sculpting of the bird figures he has become famous for, and about his lifetime love affair with poetry (what he called his 'unfinished business')."

This entry was posted by Ivy on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:15 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.