How many colleges have a Poet Laureate?
In AROUND THE COLLEGE George W. Nitchie, who taught at Simmons College in Boston from 1947 to 1986 has collected his finest “occasional” poems about life at Simmons–tributes to colleagues living and dead, reflections on the cycles of the Academic Year (“Prayer before the First Faculty Meeting of the Year,” “Before Commencement 1987,” and a poem to celebrate the college’s Centennial festivities in 1999) and lyrical observations on the changing seasons through the lense of the school year.
Nitchie’s voice is deceptively informal and chatty, but highly disciplined and wise, learned and witty. In “In Memory of R. F. Bosworth, U.S.N.R., Buried at Sea” he invokes his late colleague:
Dear Boz, you were fair, demanding, affectionate,
A lover of gossip and good writing,
And the problem now is, something that would please you,
There where you are, in the deep sea, remembered
As one whose days gave us the time we needed
To be what we had it in us to become….
To order a copy of AROUND THE COLLEGE, send a check for $12.00 (which includes shipping and handling) to: Fenway Press, 68 Pembroke St. Newton, MA 02458.
Fenway Press 
To see a slideshow by Haley Lamson of the launch party for AROUND THE COLLEGE, held at Simmons in May 2011, go to http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/sharing/shareRedirectSwitchBoard.jsp?token=770964388407%3A781390041&sourceId=533754321803&cm_mmc=eMail-_-Share-_-Photos-_-Sharee
Fenway Press laments the passing of George W. Nitchie, who died in July of 2011, but not before he was able to see and revel in the first copies of AROUND THE COLLEGE. It was our privilege to be able to bring his long dream to fruition in time for him to enjoy it.