Chestnut Ridge, available for preorder

Adrian Blevins writes:

William Faulkner is famous for mining “his own little post stamp of native soil” for what he called “the old universal truths.” In Chestnut Ridge, Dawn Potter is following Faulkner’s wise path, giving us a polyphonic portrait of southwestern Pennsylvania in an impressive range of voices, pitches, and forms. She starts with the region’s tragicomic history—“the undiagnosed roads littered with sorrows”; “the pale and ruminating / heifer”—moving gradually through time to the present. All along, mining the full possibilities of persona, our intrepid author takes possession of her own origins as melancholic witness to a bygone America whose history it would be a terrible mistake to lose. This sad, moral, and really smart book is essential reading for anyone interested in hearing a master poet sing an indispensable bereavement song.

Betsy Sholl writes:

Dawn Potter’s rich and remarkable Chestnut Ridge gives us voices and artifacts tracing the development of southwestern Pennsylvania, from 1635 to 2013--from missionaries to racial conflicts, mining disasters to the way changing times can leave us adrift.  Potter makes history alive and compelling.  These poems hold up a mirror to the way assumptions and pressures shape our lives, as they trace how the land changes from wilderness, to commercial venture, to the aftermath of industry. It’s hard to know what to praise more:  Potter’s deft and supple forms, the rich empathy through which she creates the voices of others, or the way her poems make the past alive in all its complexity.   In a time when history and truth are under attack, these poems are not only beautiful and profound, they are utterly crucial.

Books available in late June . . . preorder here.

I've been thinking about trees lately . . . how, in large and small ways, and wherever I live, they seem to have an outsized effect on my days. In Harmony that was no surprise. We lived on 40 acres of old-growth timber, mostly pines, firs, spruces, tamaracks, interspersed with smaller hardwoods--maples, cherry, poplar, ash, birch--and cedar along the streambed. Our acreage was just one small patch in the enormous stretch of woodland that cuts across northern New England, into New York, up into Canada . . . the Great North Woods, the forest king. Every time I cut anything from the garden, I had to pick pine needles out of it. Every spring I tore pine saplings out of the cultivated beds. If Tom needed to side the barn, he cut a tree for boards. We heated our house for more than two decades on culled trees, without doing any damage at all to the woods. The trees were our skyline, our fort, our weather. They surrounded us, and we were small.

Now I live in the city, but still, the trees have not ceded their power. Instead of mammoth white pines, we now have mammoth Norway maples. They loom dangerously over the houses . . . huge, beautiful, crowns of shade and green, and terrifying in a wind storm. Every time I cut anything from the garden, I pick out bits of maple flowers and maple seeds. Every spring I tear maple seedlings out of the cultivated beds. The trees are glorious and unstable. They surround us, and we are small.

Yesterday was one of those surprising days when I got a good-sized paycheck in the mail but the guy at the garage said I didn't need a brake job. Imagine! Money not spent on the same day it was acquired!

Plus, I got a lot done at my desk (a chunk of novel-editing, two Frost Place intros drafted), and I washed the floors. That's what happens when pouring rain keeps me out of the garden.

Today will be cloudy and cool, but the downpours are over for the moment. I lit a fire in the stove last night, and I may again tonight. But the plants look happy nonetheless. I think my chard and kohlrabi grew twice their size overnight, and soon I'll need to stake the tomatoes. The peas are climbing the trellis; the beans are thick. Columbine buds are unfolding. Thyme flowers blaze between the stones, and the backyard is pretending to be a lawn. After I finish my desk work, I'm going to the hardware store to buy a hummingbird feeder.

Last night, as dark was settling over the neighborhood and the rain was sluicing down, I stood at my study window staring out into the backyard. The green was so intense; my eyes drank it in, greedy for every drop. I don't love this little patch in the same way I loved my Harmony woods. But I'm learning to love it for itself.

On the spur of the moment, Tom and I decided to take the ferry to Peaks Island and spend a few hours walking along the beach road. Peaks is one of the Casco Bay islands, the closest to mainland Portland, a 20-minute ferry ride from downtown. Though it's technically just another city neighborhood, it feels like a different place entirely: beach cottages, rocky ledges, grasslands, even an oldish forest in the center of the island. And yet it's so easily accessible: just a cheap short boat ride away.

After strolling and climbing on rocks and staring out to sea and looking at eiders nesting on spits, we came back to town and ate fried clams, then drove home and took a nap, then did nothing much for the rest of the evening except listen to a baseball game. It was a fine summer play day.

Today will be less fun: there is nothing enjoyable about having to take my car to the shop to discuss a brake job and a reluctant air conditioner. And it's going to rain again, and get chilly again, and I still haven't managed to vacuum, and I've got a stack of desk work and no idea what I'll be making for dinner.

Perhaps you remember my mentioning the two Alice Waters cookbooks I acquired at a weird yard sale on Saturday? Well, I made a lemon tart from the dessert volume, and it was hands down the best lemon tart I've ever cooked. I believe the secret lay in (1) Meyer lemons, which have a wonderfully complicated flavor, and (2) a short-crust pastry flavored with lemon peel and vanilla. The result was simple, fresh, and bright, plus it sliced beautifully.

I have no particular plans for the day, other than vacuuming. I've finished the Munro and Stafford story collections and am now rereading Diane Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton. I don't know that I'll make my way through all of it again, but maybe. Tom has started refurbishing the cellar door, so at some point we will no longer have a giant black maw in the back hallway. I washed windows yesterday and now, in the morning sunlight, I can see all the spots I missed. Today I'll harvest the last of the bok choy, probably most of the rest of the radishes. It's been a wonderful growing spring for both of them: cool dampness is apparently their secret ingredient.

Writing-wise, I feel like an empty box. But given how much I've written during the past month, that's a comfortable sensation.

It rained all night and now, in the pre-dawn gloom, the white hostas loom like predators, and the deep wet green of trees and grass swell and threaten. Across the street, our neighborhood possum, a pale bustling chunk, scoots through the waning daffodils. Through the rain-soaked window screens the empty street looks like a Renoir setting, all running colors and flat light.

Supposedly the rain is ending now, and then the sun and heat will set in . . . or at least as much heat as we've seen this season. Yesterday didn't quite reach 70 but it still felt like our first summer day--warm and humid, with the top-heavy glare of July--and Tom and I walked to the farmer's market and bought pork chops and some celery seedlings, then stopped at a yard sale advertising itself as "Awful; Everything Is Broken" and bought four books (Milosz, Munro, and two Alice Waters cookbooks) and a stack of old postcards. Afterward Tom spent the rest of the day working on photographs, and I ran the trimmer and did some weeding and cleaned bathrooms and planted celery and talked to my kid and sat in the yard drinking ice tea and reading most of the Munro stories.

Today I might wash windows. I'll certainly finishing reading the Munro stories. I'm considering making a pie.

It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. 

--Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?"

Sunshine and Saturday morning. Somewhere a mourning dove is cooing--repeating her slow querulous demands like a mixed-up lady at a bus stop: "Where do I go, go, go?" From the living room window I am watching two squirrels skitter back and forth across the neighbor's driveway, apparently in search of nothing but trouble. Now Ruckus's pal Jack trots by, jaunty in his tuxedo, and the squirrels vamoose up a maple tree, jeering as they go. They are entirely scornful of cats.

Though I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy this weekend, there's nothing urgent. The garden is in decent shape; the housework is manageable. If it were really warm, I might wash windows, but the forecast is only for modest heat. Given that we traveled last weekend and that I'll be fetching P from school next weekend, we've made no plans to go anywhere in particular. I'll do some mowing and trimming, some weeding and cultivating. I'd like to find a celery plant for a garden box and maybe some annuals for flowerbeds. But all of this is puttering.

In the meantime, I'm still thinking about my new collection, A Month in Summer--fretting over whether it's actually done, actually cohesive; beginning to send queries to a few publishers who've previously been friendly about my work; researching contests to decide which few I might want to enter. Another collection, Dooryard, is already sitting on various editorial desks. And I have good news about Chestnut Ridge: it has a cover now, and cover blurbs, and with luck I'll have a few copies ready for sale at the Frost Place, though the formal publication date will be scheduled for early autumn. As soon as I have a jpeg of the cover, I'll share it with you.

But dealing with three manuscripts at once! No wonder my desk was such a rat-hole.