Bruce Guernsey found his passion to write poetry at age 23 during his first teaching position after one of his students came home in a body bag from the Vietnam War.

“It occurred to me that if I failed a male student then he would be drafted and sent off, and I had a lot of feelings I needed to express in some way,” said Guernsey, a professor emeritus of English.

At the time in 1967, Guernsey was teaching at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

In 1970, he published his first poem titled “Grading Papers” about critiquing a sentence in a student’s essay about how “a common practice for marines is to hack off V-C ears which they send back home or keep for souvenirs.”

“I scrawled down the poem after giving a comment in the paper to write it in the passive voice, and I could not believe that I found myself making a grammatical comment to something as hideous as this,” he said.

Guernsey has been writing poetry for more than 40 years, and he featured about 100 of them in his new book titled “From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010.”

Guernsey will be at the Lincoln Bookshop, 619 Monroe Ave., from 5-7 p.m. today for a book signing accompanied by wine, cheese and music.

Wendy Meyer, who has owned the Lincoln Bookshop for about a year, said this will be the first book-signing event in more than a decade.

“I generally do not read too much poetry, but I am a fan of Bruce’s,” she said. “He creates a beautiful use of language in his poems, and has a way with making words flow.”

One of the dominant themes in his poems revolves around his father returning from World War II.

“From what I understand from my mother, the war made my father a very different person,” Guernsey said. “I called him Doug for a couple of years because it didn’t register to me that he was my dad, and then I called him Pop, which seemed like the right name because he was an explosive character.”

He also wrote about a crucial event in his life that happened on May 11, 1987.

His father, who was 71 and had the degenerative disease Parkinson’s, was staying at a veterans affairs hospital in rural Pennsylvania at the time.

“He got dressed that particular day and walked out the door, and I haven’t seen him since,” he said. “His ghost wanders in my imagination still.”

He included about 15 poems about his father in the book. He also featured poems about his three uncles—who were also in World War II, his mother, his children and his wife.

He separated his collective poems in four thematic sections and said he wanted the collection to be cohesive and unified opposed to organizing it chronologically.

The first section reflects on many aspects of the natural world including “The Apple,” “Ice” and “Stones,” he said.

“When I was organizing the book, I realized that many titles were proper nouns and symbols of some kind,” Guernsey said. “I guess I was a bit of a detective with looking at things with a magnifying glass. There is a lot of intimacy with the natural world.”

He said the second section contains poems influenced by living in Illinois like “October,” which is about harvesting cornfields.

“The third section has some poems with a weird sense of humor like ‘Yam’ and ‘Oatmeal,’ and the fourth section is my attempt to resolve the themes of the first three sections,” he said.

One of the poems in the fourth section titled “Homage to Edgar Bergen” describes the tradition in Guernsey’s childhood of listening to a ventriloquist’s radio special on Sunday nights. He recounted that when he was older he thought it must have been easy to be a ventriloquist on the radio.

“It was my secret desire as a little kid to be a ventriloquist, and when I first started teaching poetry it occurred to me that I am a ventriloquist,” he said. “Speaking without moving your lips, that’s what poems are—like voices on the page.”

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].