Trinity Episcopal Church will be hosting a book signing and reception on April 22 at 1:30 p.m.

“Dressing Old Words New” is a compilation of poetry and three essays composed by church member Arnold Wayne DeLoach, 80, of Marbury.

DeLoach is a retired English professor who has been writing poetry for years.

But this is his first publication.

“I had won some prizes and contests, but I had not — up until this one, really — had a collection published,” he said.

DeLoach said completing the book has been “kind of a relief.”

“It’s an exhilarating feeling,” he said.

He thanks those who were instrumental in its compilation.

“The driving force behind this book is my priest Father Bill King … His wife also helped. If it had not been for them, I would not have the book,” DeLoach said. “So, everything goes back to them.”

Many of the poems are religious and presented from an Anglican position.

DeLoach calls his typically 14-line poems “blank verse sonnets.”

Most poems feature blank verse and meter, seldom implementing a rhyme scheme.

“That’s the rhythm that Shakespeare used when he wrote his plays. That’s the form Milton used when he wrote ‘Paradise Lost,’” DeLoach said. “So, it’s a very old metrical form.”

Emily Dickinson is another favorite poet.

“I have included in the collection two [poems] in her old form of what we call a hymn stanza — the lines are shorter than blank verse lines, and there is a kind of rhyme, but it may be one people are not normally used to.”

DeLoach offered advice about reading poetry.

“Do not assume that the speaker of the poem is the writer,” he urges readers. “Never do that. The writer has got an imagination, and he can create a situation whether he has experienced it or not.”

The essays included in the book were written when DeLoach was a volunteer at the Autauga County Heritage Association.

DeLoach said he hopes weather will behave for the book signing and reception, since the event had been postponed from the previous Sundays’ fickle forecasts.

Trinity Episcopal Church is located at 503 Second Ave. S. in Clanton.