Renaissance: A Collection of Poetry by Roger Bolan in Bloomington, MN

Roger Bolan’s calling as a poet didn’t come until he was well into his eighties. And that calling came in a most unusual way.
Roger had an experience in July of 2015 that changed his life forever. He struggled for more than a year trying to find a reasonable explanation for what happened to him and he could find none. He had been told that if something is bugging you, write it down, wad it up and throw it away. He had a word page open on the computer and he intended to spell out what was bugging him and delete it. Instead he had written the first poem ever in his life. The result was the first poem in this book, the hauntingly beautiful
My Kindred Spirit
about an old man who recognizes his lost love from another life.
Since that evening, poetry flowed from his mind and heart. The deeply touching
Mom, the Lake, and the Lily Pads
evokes happy early childhood memories of spending time with his mother on a lake in a row boat.
My Grandpa and Me
memorializes the moment he learned the value of honesty, a lesson that was to stay with him the rest of his life. Then there’s
Do Over
that captures the precious and unrepeatable value of a human life. All the poems in
Renaissance
—a title he gave the book since writing poetry is a new beginning for him at age eighty-eight—transport us into intimate scenes from a long life well-lived.
His book
, a collection of some thirty of his poems, is an inspiring testament to life’s possibilities waiting to be discovered no matter what your age.