Boston Globe, The (MA) August 17, 2003

SAUGUS POET HAS TAKEN FLIGHT
Author:ALAN LUPO, Boston Globe

Even if Tom Sheehan's name was Nunzio Goldfarb Gonzalez, you would know he was Irish-American. You can see it in his large ruddy face. You hear it in his voice, this grandson of immigrant Johnny Igoe, who left the famine and traveled alone at age 10 to these shores before the Civil War, Sheehan says, and lived almost a century.

The grandpa took the boy Tom aside when the kid was only 5, took him aside on the porch of the Main Street house in Saugus and began reading him the works of William Butler Yeats. Seventy years later, sitting at a table he crafted himself in a room he made himself, sitting in an ancient house on Central Street, next to where he grew up and a few blocks from where Johnny Igoe read to him, Tom Sheehan quotes Yeats from memory. He says his grandpa
saw the writer in him and that by the time he, Tom, was in the fourth or fifth grade, he knew himself.

So he set himself to it. He wrote with pencil, then pen, then manual typewriter, then and now computer. He wrote poetry in high school, and when he, the quarterback, called the Saugus High football team into a huddle in the mid-1940s, his pals would rib him - "How much do I love thee, let me call the play" - and he would say, "Hey, just remember. I call the plays. I'm the boss." He must have called some pretty good plays. The team was undefeated in its league in 1944.

In the Korean War, Tom the infantryman kept writing, kept writing through Boston College, when his legs were too far gone to keep playing football, kept writing forever afterward, rarely making a buck at it, as such, too often, is the nature of the craft for poets, short story writers, and novelists.
He worked his way into a management job at Raytheon, retired in 1990, and began writing as if his grandpa, his father and mother, his college professor, his wartime buddies, his old teammates, his everyman's Saugus-born and bred neighbor were sitting with him in his cluttered office, sitting there and telling him, "Tom, tell them
the story about . . ."
He has been published in print, vanity press, by small houses, and on the Internet. He guesses 500 or more of his poems have been published on various Internet sites along with 50 or more short stories. We are not talking here about some guy who whiles away his retirement hours doing doggerel.

Sheehan has the soul of John Dos Passos, of Carl Sandburg. In a "prose poem" that he calls "Saugus, Embassy of the Second Muse," he writes of that muse speaking to him.

"Dispel me of doom," the muse says. "Let the music of words come, let them dance first in your eye, roll on your tongue, live to die on the page. Let them vibrate on your spine, get kissed of your skin, shoot out of here in flight of geese, and mournful sound of heading home when there is no home, steaming freight train whistle calling you from a circle of blue nights, self shout at the moon still shining on a hill East of Cleveland, South of Yang-du, East again a long stretch from the Chugach given you in a word picture, West of a cliff near Kerry . . ."

In a short story, "Fred Rippon's Mushroom House," Sheehan relates his time as a boy shoveling horse manure near Lily Pond, his very words evoking its luxuriant stench, and writes this, "Mostly I remember the eyes of a horse that plunged through the ice, like great dishes of fear, wide and
frightened and full of the utmost knowledge. His front hooves slashed away at the ragged rim of ice, but could not lift him out, nor leather traces or ropes or sixty feet of chain, and when he went down, like a boat plunging, huge bubbles burst on the surface and a December afternoon became quiet."

Sheehan the prolific Saugonian inundates Internet publishers with poetry and stories. He wins awards. He says he could not move somewhere other than his hometown, because it is there, in the town, in the rooms where he sits that the voices of his community, past and present, come to his mind's eye, ear, and soul. But he is more than a prophet in his own land. 
So, then, Lit Pot Press, a small publisher in California, has now released "This Rare Earth & Other Flights," a collection of Sheehan's poetry. Editor Beverly Jackson says of her author, "This widely published, award-winning master has the uncanny ability to lift the reader to heights of euphoria with language so rich that it's rapturous." Sheehan says he wants people to buy the book so Jackson can break even.

"That's her money in there," says the street-smart and book-smart guy. "She put about five grand into that. We've got to sell 280 copies to get her money back."

Oh, and Tom the husband, father, and grandfather wouldn't mind making a few big ones someday either, he admits. "I'd do anything I can to make a buck," says the guy who once shoveled manure. But should no bucks appear, he will continue. Johnny Igoe would expect nothing less.
Alan Lupo can be reached at lupo@globe.com.

Copyright © 2003 Alan Lupo