An afternoon in Waterloo Park;: A narrative poem

An Afternoon in Waterloo Park evokes feelings, sights, and textures of experience of a bygone period. Prompted by the emotional strain of his mother’s death in 1968, Gerald Dumas contemplates three generations of his family and lyrically records impressions of life on Dickerson Avenue in Detroit. This is a complex family story, recollected from the surface of childhood and pondered from the depths of mature experience. Dumas’ poetic form allows for closely packed images not possible in prose. What Our Town did in its attempt to find a value for the smallest events of everyday life in early twentieth-century New England, An Afternoon in Waterloo Park achieves for midcentury mid-America-a real and honest evocation of going home.