Easthampton poet publishes tenth collection exploring family history
The Easthampton poet's tenth book draws on childhood memories and three generations of family history in the Pioneer Valley.
EASTHAMPTON — Gary Metras, an Easthampton resident and published poet, has released "Counting Bricks," his tenth book of poetry, inspired by a 1926 family portrait of his father as a three-year-old surrounded by 13 siblings in Chicopee's Aldenville neighborhood.
The book explores family bonds, generational change, and how personal memories shape identity across time. Metras, who served as Easthampton's inaugural poet laureate in 2018, taught at Hampshire Regional High School for 31 years before retiring in 2003, then taught at Springfield College for six additional years. He is a 1965 graduate of Chicopee High School and a former U.S. Air Force air traffic controller.
"Counting Bricks" contains 45 individual poems and one 10-part long poem. The collection draws from Metras's childhood in Chicopee public housing during the 1950s and 1960s, his relationship with his large extended family, his military service, his career as an educator, and reflections on marriage and love. The title poem began when Metras observed how his father and aunts and uncles were arranged by age in the photograph, resembling bricks in a wall.
Metras said his family gathered on holidays at local lakes for swimming and picnics, with relatives referring to each other by birth order—"brother number 3" or "sister number 7"—at weddings and funerals. The birth of his only granddaughter while writing these poems deepened his focus on how family traditions have shifted across generations in America over the past four to five decades.
He recalled growing up in public housing built for returning veterans and their families, where working-class residents had no sense of shame about their economic status. "We didn't have any inkling of being low class or anything like that," Metras said. His father worked as a bricklayer, and many neighbors labored in factories throughout Chicopee and Springfield.
Metras chose poetry as his medium because it allowed him to capture memories and emotions from decades earlier. Some poems came to him in dreams, surfacing forgotten details from childhood. He credited his high school English teacher with introducing him to poetry and the craft's greatest practitioners.
"Poetry just came to me naturally as a way of thinking and forming words, and stanzas and things of that nature," Metras said. He hopes readers will find moments in the collection that resonate with their own family experiences and awaken emotion or memory.
Counting Bricks is available at Broadside Bookshop in Northampton, Book Moon in Easthampton, Amazon, and directly through publisher Dos Madres Press at dosmadres.com.