The Distance Makes Things Blue --
Still True After A Quarter Century

APART FROM HAVING their mother check to see if their ears are clean, few things are more embarrassing for a writer than his or her first book. 

So high the hopes! So long and perilous the path! And so callow the sensibility of our young protagonist!

After the passage of a quarter century, I find I still like a few things from my first published book, a thin volume of verse entitled, The Distance Makes Things Blue.

All the poems in The Distance Makes Things Blue were written as song lyrics, and several were set to music -- my favorite was Rolf Johnson's jazzy treatment of "The Pyramid Builders' Polar Icecap Blues." The best lyric, though, was "Darkness for Light," which still sounds timely in another century with another war.

At the time I wrote The Distance Makes Things Blue, I was breaking up with my long-time first love, Rondi Johnson, and about to meet my future wife, Lane Morgan.

Twenty three years later, when I was traveling in Italy with my family and my marriage to Lane was breaking up, I wrote "The Tinder of Our Lives."

More recently I wrote "The Road To Buzzards Bay."

-- Bruce Brown