Donald Fairburn

Sailing and Other Poetry Donald Fairburn

This is a group of poems written by a man who was born and raised in a tenement building during the Great Depression of the 1930's. His life began and was shaped in the poverty filled streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts; streets that lay exactly halfway between Harvard and MIT. His father had immigrated from England, and his mother came from a small mining town in the mountains of Colorado, and they had come to Cambridge in order to give their children a chance at the impossible. Maybe here, their children would have a chance for an education; the one thing that could never be taken from them. He was lucky enough to get the education for which his parents had hoped. And this allowed him to live and travel as they could only have dreamed. That journey has produced a variety of impressions which are expressed here in meter and rhyme.