Leaving Gary

the long version

Rooted in the social activism of Vatican II, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, the poetry of John Sheehan is filled with keen observations of place, people and time, where steel mills and sand dunes intersect with school children, overheard remarks, blues and jazz, where pumpkins sit beneath TV sets blaring the evening news. Leaving Gary jumps from a Houston of ice cream parlors and fried chicken in the twenties, to seminary life in Canada in the forties, and teaching life today. It confronts issues of race and class, religion and landscape, memory and media, chronicling places which have changed and places we wish would change.