The Maine Arts Journal has published a sheaf of poems from my forthcoming collection Chestnut Ridge. I know you've seen some of these poems on this blog before, but Betsy Sholl (a wonderful poet, a former poet laureate of Maine, a dear supporter of her fellows) decided she'd like to reprint them together as a group. In fact, she invited me to submit them after I'd asked her, with itchy embarrassment, to write a blurb for the new book. That's the kind of sweet person she is.

My friend Christian Barter also has a sheaf of poems in this journal. They focus on Acadia National Park, where he has worked for years on trail maintenance. I guess Betsy was in the mood for poems about place, when she tapped us.

I've spent the entire weekend in a fog of intense physical laziness--sort of a reaction to the hot weather but mostly a convalescence from my Frost Place exertions. I came back from Franconia with my poet self bouncing and yodeling and my everything-else self feeling as if it had been crushed by a rockslide. I gave into the torpor for three days, but now I have to resurrect my enthusiasm for moving my arms and legs. I've got desk work to do, housework to do, yard work to do. On Thursday night I'll be back in the gig saddle, with a show up in Greenville. I need to figure out how to be peppy again.

At least I've managed to do some summer cooking: infant peas (from my patch!), gazpacho (my favorite M.F.K. Fisher recipe in which all liquids are measured in glasses, not cups), grilled marinated flank steak (okay, Tom cooked it), leftover grilled marinated flank steak turned into steak salad (with wild rice, tomatoes, scallions, garlic scapes, more wonderful peas, and a hedge's worth of chopped cilantro).

My garden has turned out to be a local conversation piece. I seem to be the only person in this neighborhood (no surprise) who has turned her front lawn into a vegetable farm, so I get a lot of chat from passersby. But they seem to like it. The plot is pretty, and meanwhile I sit on the front stoop in a faded summer dress and shell peas into a dishpan, just like a regular old-fashioned farmwife. It's a disguise I enjoy.