The poetic legacy of Rod Jellema continues to thrill and excite his readers/listeners as they respond to the weaving of the magic of his words.

His impromptu poetry reading at the new Book Nook & Java Shop made believers in the glory, power, and fun use of words that can enrich our existence.

Jellema, professor of English emertius at the University of Maryland who has a home in Montague, has been writing poetry for 40 years. His nine poems recited at the Book Nook reading ranged from the most basic, including the heritage of cows that produced the milk of his Holland boyhood, to the profundity of tying Plato’s “Republic” and the concept of civilization to the discovery of how someone 9,000 years ago, took a crane’s hollow wing bone to make a flute.

You have to realize that Jellema is a superb reader of poetry. In a current world where the actual reading of just a complete sentence can be called into question, Jellema describes poetry as “it is sounds as ‘read‘ more by the ear than the eye. It is how the poet translates an idea into marks on a page that eventually mean something.”