Author's note: I'm in my mid-eighties, and I've just finished writing this collection of poems drawn from my boyhood years. They're not poems about my early life-they're poems from my early life.

Each poem arose from a separate journey. I went back, became the boy I once was, then took a snapshot of something happening in that place and time.

The place is a small farming and coal mining community in Western Pennsylvania. The time is my boyhood years, 1929-1937 or thereabouts.

I'm sending these snapshots to my children and grandchildren. I'm also offering them to you, hoping you'll...