History Room Live returns April 9th!

For National Poetry Month, Malcolm Hamilton will lead a discussion of Roger D. Skillings’s poem, King’s Dock. The poem is about growing up in Bath and growing to understand its history.

Skillings’s poem relates to his childhood living for a time in an historic (1783) home on the banks of the Kennebec River in Bath. The poem describes that experience and the history that eventually drove the British out in 1775, who were sending masts and ship-building lumber back to England—but not before they and other European invaders drove out the native peoples. The end of the poem is Roger, as a mature man reflecting on the events of his life in Bath and their significance—man’s inhumanity to man.

The poem is long, so we recommend reading it ahead of time! Download a PDF of the poem here. Or, read it online in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of TriQuarterly.