Nick Stone Submitted photo

As part of the Camden Public Library’s celebration of both National Poetry Month and Maritime Month in April, the library plans to host writer Nick Stone for an online event at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 7.

He will introduce his new book, “SEAWARD: A Lyrical Memoir.” The program will include both true-to-life stories and readings of poetry inspired by the sea.

There are heavy doses of salt water in Stone’s memoir of his first 89 years, according to a news release from the library. The ocean is his overall metaphor, but there is more, as he takes the reader from infancy through childhood, career, love in many forms, aging, and mortality driven home by a terminal diagnosis.

In a review of the memoir by Richard Blanco, 2013 presidential inaugural poet, Blanco says, “As Jorge Luis Borges noted, poetry should ‘touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.’ Nick Stone’s heartful and tenderly rendered collection certainly touches us powerfully in this way, embracing us with a life fully lived through all the wonders that poetry awakens in us.”

Stone resides for most of the year on a small island off the coast of Maine, where he spent all his childhood summers and established his lifelong relationship with the sea. After graduating from Princeton with honors in English, he served four years as an officer in the Coast Guard between Boston and Greenland. Three years later he graduated from Harvard Law School and began the practice of law in Boston. He retired in 2006 and began a serious writing of poetry.

To learn more, visit librarycamden.org. Maritime Month is supported by Camden Riverhouse Hotel & Inn.