Thursday, June 29, 6:30 p.m.—RUTLAND—Phoenix Books Rutland will host an evening of poetry featuring “Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry,” a new title from Green Writers Press, Thursday, June 29 at 6:30 p.m. The event will feature contributors Megan Buchanan, Tamra Higgins, and Mary Jane Dickerson, as well as Green Writers Press founder Dede Cummings and Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord. Cummings will also share her new collection of poetry, “To Look Out From.”
About “Roads Taken”: With its mystical landscape and fiercely self-reliant citizenry, Vermont has inspired poets from its earliest days. This anthology of contemporary Vermont poets represents a wide range of accomplished voices both young and old, both renowned and relatively unestablished. Their poems offer news, in Ezra Pound’s words, that stays news, and they do so in a wide variety of forms and subjects. While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in this volume claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich and ongoing legacy of the state’s poetic tradition. “Roads Taken” is edited by Sydney Lea, Chard deNiord, and Dede Cummings.
Poet and critic Dan Chiasson had this to say: “Vermont tempts poets to epiphany by staying silent, or cold, or flinty, or dark, ironizes their praise. Many people move to Vermont because of the idea of it, an idea that has proven remarkably durable over time: as these poems suggest, so powerfully do the daily necessities of living there, of surviving there, assert themselves. This is where Frost comes in: Frost’s poems are the great rural instruction manual for our neck of the woods. His influence is everywhere in the poems collected here, which so often take ‘nature’ not as an idyllic refuge but as a site of careful, strenuous, and repeated steps or actions. The Vermonters in this book come from and live all over. Roads Taken is a ‘constellation/of patches and pitches,’ proof to me that Vermont will always require the imagination of its citizens to exist.”
This event is free and open to all. Phoenix Books Rutland is located at 2 Center Street in Rutland. Copies of “Roads Taken” and “To Look Out From” will be available for attendees to purchase and have signed. For more information, call 802-855-8078 or visit phoenixbooks.biz.
Photo courtesy of Phoenix Books Rutland
Dede Cummings is the founder of Green Writers Press, and one of the editors of “Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry.”
