The Barefoot Time

There is a particular quality of light in memory, golden and unhurried, and Caldwell's verses capture it perfectly. Written for publication in magazines like The Youth's Companion and Outlook, these are not mere nursery rhymes but careful, tender observations of what it means to be young. The title poem aches with the specific nostalgia of summer feet on warm earth, of days that stretched forever. Yet Caldwell refuses mere sentimentality. Alongside celebrations of rural innocence stand poems like 'The Tenement Babies,' which turns its gaze toward children who knew no barefoot running, only hard city streets. This duality gives the collection its unexpected weight: it remembers childhood as it truly was, not as we wish it to be. The 'verses a trifle beyond the barefoot time' were included, Caldwell admits, for 'children of a larger growth' - those of us who return to these pages not as children but as adults, seeking something we didn't know we'd lost. For readers who loved Millay's poems for children, for those who remember the particular loneliness and magic of being young, this collection holds both the sweetness and the ache of growing up.