North Country Press
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
  • Fiction
    • The Twentieth Maine
    • The Union Forever
    • In Search of Honor - Book II : Bowdoin
    • Dancing at the Colony
    • High Green
    • Crazy Moon
    • In Search of Honor
    • Maine Has Moxie
    • Beyond the Ledge
    • The Diary
    • Thermoil
    • First Cousin Once Removed
    • Head of Falls
    • Bad Moon Rising
    • The Heart of Stone
    • A Tunnel in the Pines
    • Centered
    • Distant Cousin
    • Lightning Strikes
    • The River Home
    • More Dam Trouble
    • The Aberration
    • The Dam Committee
    • Feather Island
    • The Memory Keepers
    • Island Odyssey
    • Official Secrets
    • Scuba Gold
    • Code Breaker
    • Nightmare and Her Foal
    • How To Talk Yankee
  • Non Fiction
    • Up Home Again
    • Chainsaws and Cherry Burls
    • Mystery Tusk
    • Nature I Loved
    • Fly Fishing the Hex Hatch
    • On the Wrong Side of the River
    • Wildflowers of Chebeague and the Casco Bay Islands
    • Maine Al Fresco
    • A Daily Dose of Yiddish
    • Thoreau's Maine Woods
    • Winter
    • A Sporting Year in Maine
    • Freedom Farm
    • River Voices: Perspectives on the Presumpscot
    • Deathbed Reflections
    • A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine
    • The Thistle Inn
    • Life List
    • When They Took Dad Away
    • Living the Dream
    • Water Village
    • Logging Towboats and Boom Jumpers
    • Eagles and Evergreens
    • BLACK TO BLUE
    • A LIFETIME OF HUNTING & FISHING
    • Still Mill
    • The Belfast and Moosehead Lake Railroad
    • Summer to Fall
    • Will Write For Food
    • Behind the Blue Lights
    • Deer Diaries
    • My Naked Safari
    • Owls Head Revisited
    • Memories of Shucking Peas
    • Sailing Above Lobsters
    • The Depot Hill Gang
    • Blue Lights in the Night
    • Reminiscences and Recipes
    • Unexpected Journey
    • 50 Great New England Family Vacations
    • John Muench
    • The Arctic Schooner Bowdoin
    • A Maine Point of View
    • Glaciers & Granite
    • Is There a Doctor in the Barn
  • Children & Young Adult
    • Come Out to Play, Mr. Blue Jay!
    • Moe Pea the Moose Grows Up
    • A Fine Orange Bucket
    • Cinnamon Birds
    • The Blue Bottle
    • The Flower Patch Pals
    • Crazy Moon
    • Maine Has Moxie
    • Just a Little Fog
    • Colors of Maine
    • Tippy Tom Surprises His Friends at School
    • The White Belt Society
    • A Salty Tail
    • Behold the Turtle
    • Bustah and Bumpah
    • Kittery Ghost
    • Bear Moonlight Sonata
    • Tippy Tom Our Maine Woodland Elf Discovers Alpacas
    • A Tunnel in the Pines
    • Meet My Fantastic Friend Floyd
    • The Kennebec is Rising
    • A Singular Peluche
    • More Adventures of Tippy Tom
    • The Perfect Christmas Egg
    • The Halloween Princess
    • Inland
    • Tales of a Woodland Elf
    • Here's Juggins
  • Poetry
    • Adrift
    • Dark Matter
    • Breathe Here
    • To Bury or Burn
    • Quarry
    • Blueberry Moon
    • The Bookbinder's Wife
    • Liner Notes
    • The North End
    • Salty Liquor
    • Garland, Maine and the Old Maple Tree: Windows From My Soul
    • Bedding Vows
    • At The Grave of The Unknown Riverdriver
  • Cooking
    • Reminiscences and Recipes
    • Cooking With Weezie
  • Outdoor & Nature
    • Life List
    • Deer Diaries
    • My Naked Safari
    • Sailing Above Lobsters
    • The Arctic Schooner Bowdoin
    • Stoneflies & Turtleheads
    • 50 Great New England Family Vacations
    • Allagash Origins
    • Bassin' in New England
    • Unexpected Journey
    • Salar
    • Language of the Forest
    • Glaciers & Granite
    • Eastern Birds of Prey
    • Maine Al Fresco
    • Hawks at my Wingtip

POETRY

The North End

by Judith Robbins

Picture
     The North End is Judith Robbins’ first collection of poems. It is a tribute to the life experiences of people in a neighborhood of the working-class poor in post-World War II Worcester, Massachusetts. From three-decker, cold-water apartments and broken streets, the writer has gathered poems that call attention to that hardscrabble place and to the humanity of those who lived there.
     The poems from the second half of the collection reflect the writer’s migration North to Maine. She offers the reader poems of the sea, the woods, and relationships, in a cold climate where warmth is at a premium.

       Judith Robbins’ The North End, is an honest look back at the characters, incidents and landscapes of a childhood “war zone lost in time,” and a series of reflections on the serenity and turbulences of life lived much later in Maine. Simultaneously startling, insightful, painful and determined, the poems in this collection explore the relationships of language to memory, of lifelong hurt to resolve, and of love in its dizzying array of guises from place to person. The straightforwardness in these poems is refreshing, and the range of emotion expansive.
                                 —DANA WILDE, author of the Off Radar reviews column for the                                        Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel newspapers.

 
   
 Poet Judith Robbins has taken the stones of her first house, in the gritty, frost-bitten North End neighborhood where she grew up, and built a second house – a life devoted to writing - where she has flourished. The girl who watched and felt deeply what she saw became the woman who reconstructs in story-poems and portraits the hazards of that childhood: the boy who killed cats, the girl whose mouth was disfigured by a dog bite, the boy who fell to his death from a second story window, the mother with knuckles raw from hanging clothes outside in winter.
     In “My Retinue,” “Dependence,” “Repentance” and “Tony’s Candy Store” we too feel the shame and disappointments of life lived early on the edge, but we also taste the sweetness and hope, and see what can be saved.
     With emphatic honesty mingled with strength and compassion, Robbins honors that harshness, showing us too the loving family that nurtured her, and a transforming faith that has guided her steps.  There is great heart here.
                                    —LUCY MARTIN, Writer
 

   Judith Robbins’ poems are vivid, funny, sometimes shocking, always moving. Reading these poems, you find yourself in hardscrabble working class Worcester of the post-war era, the dark places between the tripledeckers; or you’re plopped down into the unpredictable weather of inland Maine.  Wherever the poems take you, the light gets in. Family, place, heritage, language: these poems bring all those things together in moments and memories that again and again give us glimpses of haven (and heaven). 
             —JANE COSTLOW, Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College
 

    


 





The North End

$14.95
Add to Cart
by Judith Robbins
​ISBN 978-1-943424-10-8
Paperback - 80 pages
PicturePhoto by Cyndi Brinkler
  Judith Robbins is the mother of four and a graduate of Bates College and Harvard Divinity School. She grew up on Milton Street in the North End of Worcester, MA, in an area called Poets Hill, the neighborhood she celebrates in this, her first collection. She moved to Maine in 1967 with her husband Jon, where she still lives and writes. Her first poem was published when she was seven, and she has since been widely published in magazines and journals, including The Worcester Review, Puckerbrush Review, and The American Scholar. 


Check out this feature story by Annie's Book Stop of Worcester
​https://anniesbookstopworcester.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/author-spotlight-judith-robbins/
Picture
'LIKE' US ON FACEBOOK