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George Herbert, ‘“The Flower”
Here at the Library, looking forward to spring and our new programs, “recovered greenness” is what I feel. Reaching out to the writers, poets, biographers, scholars all, in our community whose programs had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, I feel a sense of renewal and hope for new beginnings.
In his memorial tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill quoted the Italian poet and essayist Eugenio Montale “The ancients said poetry is a staircase to God” maybe with our 21st century sensitivity we might say it is a staircase to new ways of seeing.
It is this new way of seeing that stands out as a theme in all that is happening around books old and new and friends old and new here at the Stonington Free Library.
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In the United States in recent years, a kind of writing variously called nature writing or landscape writing has begun to receive critical attention, leading some to assume that this is a relatively new kind of work.
In fact, writing that takes into account the impact nature and place have on culture is one of the oldest - and perhaps most singular - threads in American writing.
Melville in Moby-Dick, Thoreau, of course, and novelists such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner come quickly to mind here, and more recently Peter Matthiessen, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poets W.S. Merwin, Amy Clampitt and Gary Snyder.