Over the weekend I received my copy of UMass Press's spring-summer 09 catalog, which lists my forthcoming Milton memoir. The book itself is not ready (though I have started seeing samples of page design). But I do have this catalog description, in case you happen to know any librarians or booksellers who like to buy books, because I sure don't. The description is accompanied by a lovely 17th-century woodcut of a woman picking apples, and the amount of cleavage she reveals is certain to encourage sales. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to drag the illustration out of the PDF file, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

Tracing Paradise

Two Years in Harmony with

John Milton

Dawn Potter

University of Massachusetts Press

The story of a writer’s intense

engagement with a masterwork of

Western literature

One winter morning, poet Dawn Potter

sat down at her desk in Harmony, Maine,

and began copying out the opening lines

of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Her intent

was to spend half an hour with a poem

she had never liked, her goal to transcribe

a page or two. Maybe she would begin to

appreciate the poet’s art, though she had

no real expectations that the exercise

would change her mind about the poem.

Yet what began as a whim turned rapidly

into an obsession, and soon Potter was

immersed in a strange and unexpected

project: she found herself copying out

every single word of Milton’s immense,

convoluted epic.

     Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony

with John Milton is her memoir of that

long task. Over the course of twelve

chapters, Potter explores her very personal

response to Milton and Paradise Lost,

tracing the surprising intersections

between a seventeenth-century biblical

epic and the routine joys and tragedies of

domestic life in contemporary rural

Maine. Curious, opinionated, and eager,

she engages with the canon on mutable,

individual terms. Though she writes

perceptively about the details and

techniques of Milton’s art, always her

reactions are linked to her present-tense

experiences as a poet, small-time farmer,

family member, and citizen of a poor and

beleaguered north-country town.

    A skilled and entertaining writer,

Potter is also a wide-ranging and sophisticated

reader. Yet her memoir is not a

scholarly treatise: her enthusiasms and

misgivings about both Milton and Paradise

Lost ebb and flow with the days. Tracing

Paradise reminds us that close engagement

with another artist’s task may itself be a

form of creation. Above all, Potter’s

memoir celebrates one reader’s difficult

yet transformative love affair with

Milton’s glorious, irritating, inscrutable

masterpiece.

“Potter writes beautifully. Her prose is as

clear as the song of a bell bird. She knows

how to use detail, quotations from Milton

but also domestic detail, for this is a book

about living sensibly more than about

Milton. It made me ponder my life as well

as literature, as a good book should do but

few books do. . . . Reading this memoir

was an intellectual joy. I know a little

about country things, a lot about children,

and some, maybe, about the way husbands

and wives tumble through life. The book

is the real thing.”

—Samuel Pickering, author of Edinburgh

Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Dawn Potter is the author of two

poetry collections, most recently How

the Crimes Happened. She is associate

director of the Frost Place Conference

on Poetry and Teaching and lives in

Harmony, Maine, with her husband

and two sons.

Memoir

144 pp., 14 illus.

$22.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-701-6

May 2009