Small Town Kid is the experience of regional life as a child, in an insular town during the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, remote from the more worldly places where life really happens, in a time before the internet and the online existence of social media.It is a time when a small town boy can walk a mile to school and back every day, and hunt rabbits with his dog in the hours of freedom before … freedom before sundown. He can hoard crackers for bonfire night and blow up the deputy school master’s mailbox in an act of joyous rebellion.
It is a time when a small town teenager will ride fourteen miles on a bicycle for his first experience of girls, and of love. A time when migrating from a foreign country to a small town means his family will always feel that they are strangers, while visitors to the town are treated like an invading host.
It is also the remembrance of tragedy for inexperienced friends driving on narrow country roads.
This collection of poems and stories shares the type of childhood that has mostly disappeared in contemporary times. Come and revisit it here, in the pages of a Small Town Kid.
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I have read many poetry collections over the years, but Small Town Kid is unusual and intriguingly different. It flows through the different ages of the author from a very small boy to fatherhood, sharing the highs and lows of childhood and the coming of age years.
You are invited in by ‘I can Hardly Wait to Show You‘… that sets the scene of this town where singing waters and scrubby creeks beckon and land supported sheep and gold prospectors tried their luck.
Having accepted that invitation you become a spectator as Oma rocks the cradle of the young child whilst his mother works and makes poppy cakes, and Opa comforts a crying toddler as he contemplates the labour that has gone into cultivating the land around them. We are introduced to other members of this extended family and share in their celebrations, including a wedding in the fire house. This background is important as it highlights the sense of disconnection felt by many immigrant families who settle in a new land and are torn between adapting and still holding on to their old traditions and customs.
We enjoy picnics, and a detailed description of the view from the inside of the outhouse, and its maintenance by the stoic Nightman, and the profitable recycling of newspapers to the butcher. We join in rabbit hunts, school days, drag races, anti-tourist activities, and miscalculations when dispatching rubbish. Easter and the annual fete offer entertainment as does a rather interesting firework distribution method. The teen years bring jostling for status and the discovery that girls have some interesting attributes.
We also share in the lives of members of the group that the author grew up with, including its tragedies. It serves to remind us that however idyllic it might seem to be part of a small town community, it cannot protect you from all of life’s dangers.
I enjoyed all the memories and felt engaged with the young Frank as he navigated through these years. It was brought to life by the storytelling and there was a smooth flow from one story to the next. One of the many personal favourites is ‘Mcalpine’s Cherries’ which mirrored my experience with picking strawberries.
Overall a delightful read that will resonate with readers whose childhood and teen years were considerably simpler than today. I can highly recommend.
This delightful book of poems by Frank Prem is packed with interesting poems about his childhood, growing up in a small town in Australia. I love history and also enjoy learning about people and how they live so this book appealed to both of these interests of mine.
There are poems about a small child being cared for by both of his grandparents while his own parents work and the little pleasures such as eating home made poppy cakes, and peeks into the lives of close relatives such as an aunt who had a very lively spirit that showed through at certain times in her live belying the prim and proper exterior she was expected to display as a married matron.
One poignant poem is about loss of faith following a tragedy:
“but when the letter for my mother came
in black-lined airmail
from the village of her parents
she wept with bitterness
of injustice and loss and grief
she cried for so long
I was afraid
she would never stop.”
There is a poem about a family picnic and poems about the outhouse, which really intrigued me:
“wide enough
and slippery enough
to swallow a small boy
whole
unless he is carefully perched
on the front edge
as he drums his feet
against the box.”
The author clearly grew up in an old fashioned society where people were careful with things and tried to stretch a penny:
“sixpence
for a couple of pounds of paper
and the news
becomes the wrapping
for another feed
of tender young chops.”
My favourite of all Frank’s poems, a tricky place (the annual fete) was a superb insight into small town life at the time. I am not going to give you a peep into that poem, you will have to purchase the book and read it for yourself.
This book of poems is an intriguing and insightful look at country towns – one of my favourite subjects. This book has poems that show an Australia that’s gone – or is it? The stories are wonderful, closely entwined with the people and place. It will bring a smile, maybe a wink, and you will enjoy every word.
It’s also worth listening to the presentations at the library (see his website).
Fun, Frank, and wondful reading. Thank you.
Frank Prem’s memoir in verse, Small Town Kid, opens with a poem titled “I can hardly wait to show you.” This poem is a direct invitation to the reader to “take my hand in the main street / of this town hewn from honey granite / I will tell you what once stood here and there / and you might help me rediscover what I knew / when I was in the springtime of my life.”
This was an invitation that proved itself irresistible, as I walked with the speaker through his early childhood, his world defined by his family and their ethnic heritage, to the dawning of civilization for his small town when outhouses were replaced with sewerage lines, to his schoolboy days of hijinks and lessons learned, to his adolescence and young adulthood when he began to realize that “we were just kids / watching time pass away / in a place where open space / formed the barriers and walls / of nowhere to go.”
Perhaps most striking about this collection of poems memoir is the voice. The speaker’s voice is authentic, accessible, and compelling. This is a voice with stories to tell and truths to impart, a voice I want to listen to. In addition to the voice of the primary speaker, the poet skillfully interweaves other voices, the voices he would have heard growing up.
I also appreciated the touches of wry humor threaded throughout the collection as the adult speaker looks back on the foibles of childhood: the watchers from below of an outhouse user (“halfmoon at the trapdoor”), a boy’s hatred of the barber who gave him a short-back-and-sides “like a little boy / or an old man” (“hating whitey”), and a schoolboy’s blaming his poor grade in art on the teacher, his flirting with the girls having had nothing to do with it (“state of the art”).
In terms of craft, the poems are written with short lines, no punctuation, and no capitalization except for the first-person “I,” all of which work well to convey the fluidity of memory and the interplay of past and present. Also noteworthy is the use of concrete sensory imagery: the sights, sounds, and smells of this particular childhood.
Small Town Kid is very much a memoir of place, rural Australia in the late 1960s to early 1970s:
“around the base of mount buffalo
between myrtleford and porepunkah on
the low green flats of ovens river
snuggled under the purple
of the uncleared slopes of the mountain
the business was mostly tobacco” (from “picnic story”)
“ . . . watching the kookaburra
silhouetted against the red sky” (from “sunsets are . . . “)
“a line of nails
head high on the paling fence
a sharp knife
and fast hands
are the basic requirements
of the rabbit-o” (from “rabbit-o”)
At the same time, there was much I recognized from my own childhood growing up in a small town in northern Vermont: the intense rivalry with a neighboring town, the teenage pregnancies, the schoolmates lost to careless driving, the drudgery of dairy farming for a living, even the boy who accidentally set fire to the pasture.
The standout of the collection for me was “a tricky place (the annual fete),” in which the adult speaker returns to the abandoned churchyard where the town’s annual fete was once held. Although the church “seems small now / almost shrivelled / lifeless,” every detail of that annual event is still a clear, living memory.
Ultimately, memory itself is the tricky place when a small town kid returns later in life. He mourns for the place that is now gone, yet he had to leave it to become the person he wanted to be. I will definitely be returning to Frank Prem’s poetry again and again.