Gloucester Alumni

Peter K. Prybot, Staff Writer
Gloucester Daily Times

Getting from here to there often is an interesting tale. A Gloucester High School Class of 2007 graduate just read from and signed copies of her first book of poetry.

“Yellow white ...”

“Yellow white, I take flight up into the blue sky,” read July Rose Coleridge White’s first poem, which she wrote around age 4. The Gloucester resident is a descendant of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge on her English-born father’s side.

“Maybe the poetry runs in the genes. My mom and dad also exposed me to poetry when I was a youngster,” White said.

Her father, James, is a shipwright, and mother, Cara, owns and operates Cara White Gardener. Teachers J.P. Ware at O’Maley Middle School and James Cook at Gloucester High also encouraged White with her poetry.

“Both teachers did units of poetry,” she said.

“I really love poetry. Poetry allows you to encapsulate an event from multiple levels. You can tell a story and paint a picture with it. It’s more whole than writing an essay. You can create multiple perspectives the way you use the words,” White said. She added, “I feel I can communicate with myself better with poetry. It just kind of flows with me.”

White writes most of her poetry in free verse.

Put it together

White recently finished “Collected Poems,” a soft-cover text that contains 15 of her favorite poems. The first few lines of the poem, “The Island”, read:

“So let us bend with the tide

and wet our knees

at the lapping of a familiar shore

in search of the seashells that tell

pale stories of our youth.”

“I made the book’s cover in school. I printed the pages on my computer and also bound them, too,” White said. A grant from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and the Gloucester School Connection helped defray printing costs.

White’s first book reading and signing took place in late June at Lanesville Community Center — the very site she began preschool at approximately the age her poetry first emerged. Holding the completed book at the reading “... felt great. I knew then that I had finally finished it. The signing that followed was all fun. Sharing the book with family and friends there also felt good,” she said.

Betsy Ingram, one of her Lanesville Preschool teachers, and Mrs. Munroe, her fifth-grade teacher at Beeman, attended the event. The book, which sells for $6, can be purchased at The Bookstore on Main Street in Gloucester.

Not surprising

Those who know of White’s publishing feat aren’t surprised by it, while those who will read about it for the first time won’t be either. White is a world traveler with an impressive vocabulary for an 18-year-old. She was captain of the girls’ track team, president of the student council, co-editor of the school newspaper, The Gillnetter, a member of the National Honor Society, and a recipient of both a Sawyer Medal and the North Shore Scholastic Athletic Award. White was one of three keynote student speakers at her graduation and was No. 5 in a class of 333 students. In other words, she’s on the ball.

To find her niche in the literary world, White will major in English and minor in art when she starts this fall at the University of New Hampshire.

“This is what college is all about. I want to travel a lot, too. I’d love to eventually work for ‘The New Yorker,’” she said. She said she will continue writing poetry.