Robert Carothers

ROBERT CAROTHERS - FREEDOM AND OTHER TIMES

First published by The Poet’s Press in 1972. This new 50th Anniversary Edition is completely reset in Plantin type and published as a free download PDF ebook.

Robert L. Carothers was born in 1942 in Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River. The poems in this volume, published in 1972, are arranged in a kind of geography, and tracing his footsteps from a blue-collar community, to grad school at Kent State University, where he was studying at the time the state militia opened fire on a student protest, to Edinboro State College in Northwestern PA, where he taught English in the department where he had been an undergraduate just a few years earlier. The poems here include Carothers’ signature poem, “Muskrat,” and portraits of local characters from Freedom, including a grandfather who had joined the Wobblies. In one poignant poem, he talks about the impossibility of returning to a small town: “You do not know me; your strange/ Eyes stare hard at my beard,/ Your lean faces call me the stranger.” The Kent State poems are overshadowed with war, with an elegy to Allison Krause, a student killed at Kent State. A few poems come from a sojourn in Maine, before the return to Edinboro, where he writes about the burning of the school’s administration building, and reflects on the suicide of a felow poet: “so the poet flirts with madness,/ brings himself to the brink of it/ and knows himself there.”

Robert Carothers studied under Donald Washburn at Edinboro and Jacob Leed at Kent State. He lives today with his wife Jayne in Wakefield, RI, after a long tenure as president of the University of Rhode Island. His other books include Poems for the End of Something (1969), John Calvin’s Favorite Son (1980) and Winter Poems (2008). Individual poems have appeared in many small magazines. Carothers acknowledges the influence of Dylan Thomas on his work, as well as the storytelling of miners, railroaders, fishermen, and decades of his students.

This is the 299th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published October 2022. 60 pages, 6 x 9 inches, PDF ebook. CLICK HERE to download.

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Version 1.1 Updated January 13, 2026.