Where the Deer Were – SAVE 40%!

Pastoral, narrative, deliberately lyrical, the poetry of Kate Barnes is set solidly in the rural Maine countryside, and in the literary tradition in which she was raised (her father was Henry Beston, her mother Elizabeth Coatsworth). There she lives near the house that Beston made famous in Northern Farm, drawing strength and inspiration from the coastal landscape to steady her through the changing seasons of life.

This is wise and moving verse: not abstract or self-consciously “modern,” but clean and convincing verse, as Robert Creeley has commented, “of a deep and heartfelt clarity.” These are poems that examine and celebrate the ingredients of our humanity: friendship and wonder, loneliness and endurance, sexuality and unrequited longing, familial ties and the overriding relationship of the individual to nature, to landscape and animals, and to the living earth itself.

Kate Barnes was Maine’s first official Poet Laureate. She was also a gifted artist, a serious scholar of literature, and a maker of beautiful handmade books.

Mary Azarian grew up on a small farm in Virginia, where she had horses, rabbits and chickens. After graduating from Smith College, where she studied printmaking with Leonard Baskin, she married and moved to a farm in northern Vermont. There she taught for four years in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in the state. She has been a full-time printmaker since 1969. Her illustrated books include Kneeling Orion by the poet, Kate Barnes, The Tale of John Barleycorn, and A Farmer's Alphabet.