BELFAST April is National Poetry Month and to celebrate the Belfast Free Library is hosting two Poetry Readings in the Abbott Room of the Library. On Thursday April 6, at 6 p.m., three Maine Poets will read from their new books in a reading titled.
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Joseph A. Conforti has been helping us understand Maine for quite some time. He arrived in 1987 to establish an American and New England Studies Program at USM that trained educators and historians. Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity, did what the subtitle says. Conforti edited the best book on our metropolis, Creating Portland, but still can’t fully explain why there’s no great Portland novel.
His new book, Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country, discusses great novels from the rest of Maine, beginning with Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) and nearing the present with Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys (2013) and Monica Wood’s memoir, When We Were the Kennedys (2012).
Deep Water: ‘Cold Harvest,’ by Jenny Doughty
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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This week’s poem, by Jenny Doughty, brings us into the season of ice, and into a past when ice was precious through the warmer months. I love this poem for its vivid details of the ice harvesters’ work, for the delight it shows ice bringing to warm mouths, and for its sudden turn to the present – and our new understanding of just how precious ice is.
Doughty is British but has lived in Maine since 2002 and is an American citizen. In the U.K., she edited a Penguin anthology of pre-20th-century poetry, “Key Poets,” and wrote children’s non-fiction, short stories and magazine articles under the name Jenny Green. Her book “Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber” was published by Moon Pie Press. She is president of the Maine Poets Society.