This is a collection of poems that Dave Russell, a longtime Vermonter, wrote over the span of 50 or 60 years. They cover a variety of topics that reflect his experiences in both farming and the machine tool industry, as well as a wide range of his other interests and obsevations. Some are humorous and some are thoughtful. Thay all reflect the honest thoughts of this Vermonter of more than 80 years, who says, "I would rather preach gospel as poetry than as oratory. I hope that some of my sentiments take root."
In making her selection for Pharos Editions, Dana Spiotta tells us how drawn she was by the work of Raymond Mungo. "[He] writes . . . about his own joy and his own pain, he is particularly good when he describes the land around him and how it feels on his body." Indeed, if Henry David Thoreau had downed a handful of liberty caps before penning Walden it would have read much like Mungo's Total Loss Farm, a rollicking memoir of the late 1960's back–to–the–earth movement. Written in a limber prose style formed by the tempo of the times, Mungo takes us into the cultural tsunami of a failed radical politics as it broke on the shoals of a drug–fueled personal freedom and washed inland across the farmlands of Vermont, leaving a trail of damage and redemption in its wake. Total Loss Farm attracted widespread critical and commercial attention in 1970, when the "back–to–the–land" hippie commune movement first emerged. The book's first section, "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," appeared as the cover article in the May 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The hardcover first edition from Dutton was quickly followed by paperback editions from Bantam, Avon, and Madrona Publishers, keeping the book in print for several decades. Very recently, Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review cited Total Loss Farm as "the best and also the loopiest of the commune books."
Conceptual gardens depend on inspiration which is the result of an exhaustive intellectual process. The starting point is an IDEA or stimulus that pushes the design along, rather than observing more conventional styles - whether classical of modernist - into which idea or relationships are fitted. Horticultural considerations, architectural or aesthetic doctrines and practically-based problem-solving are either abandoned or regarded as a means to an end, rather than the end in itself. Idea-driven design, therefore, cannot be taught by a 'rule-of-thumb' methodology. So, the way to design a conceptualist garden is not the theme of this book; nor does it contain 'of-the-peg' solutions for garden and landscape designers. Rather it encourages student and professional designers to think further towards their designed solutions.
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–1928 is the second installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected; here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume 2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends; colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and admirers. In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Frost’s stature in America and abroad, and the demands of managing his career—as public speaker, poet, and teacher—intensified. A good portion of the correspondence is devoted to Frost’s appointments at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, through which he played a major part in staking out the positions poets would later hold in American universities. Other letters show Frost helping to shape the Bread Loaf School of English and its affiliated Writers’ Conference. We encounter him discussing his craft with students and fostering the careers of younger poets. His observations (and reservations) about educators are illuminating and remain pertinent. And family life—with all its joys and sorrows, hardships and satisfactions—is never less than central to Frost’s concerns. Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and always engaging. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a unique contribution to American literature.
An autobiography told in poems, this selection of work spans more than 40 years, beginning with the avant-garde arts movement and political activism of the 1960s. A mixture of intense political poems, intimate love poems, and provocative reflections, it traces the journey of a woman intimately involved with many significant events of the 20th century--the antiwar, feminist, and gay liberation movements, including time spent in Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Barcelona. Accompanied by exquisite photographs, this collection culminates with a suite of 12 poems connecting contemporary history with the 17th century world of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
