Thursday, June 20
7 pm
At Thoreau Farm
$5/ person to attend in person. Registration Required.
Catherine Staples in conversation with Richard Higgins about the importance of Thoreau in the writing of her newest book of poetry, VERT, which is part elegy, part quest, part paean to the natural world.
Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it’s there, in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts, that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the mountains, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England’s early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau’s narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to “the living earth,” a new way of seeing things.
Vert is an old word in danger of being lost. “In English forest law,” it’s “everything that grows and forms a green leaf, serving as cover for deer.” It’s suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spinney of a brother’s memory.
Forty-eight poems make up the four sections of Vert: “With Rocks and Stones and Trees,” “Fury,” “Survivors,” and “Pilgrimage.”
Catherine Staples is the author of Vert (Mercer University Press), The Rattling Window (The Ashland Poetry Press), and Never a Note Forfeit (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickle, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, POETRY, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and others. Honors include the Guy Owen Prize, McGovern Poetry Prize, Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and multiple residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Staples grew up in Dover, MA and lives in Devon, PA. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University, and she serves on the board of the Thoreau Society.
Richard Higgins is a writer, book editor and the author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees. He was a staff writer for The Boston Globe for 20 years, and is on the Thoreau Society board. A graduate of Holy Cross College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Divinity School, Richard lives in Concord. His new book on Thoreau’s religion is scheduled to come out from the University of Chicago Press in 2024. He is also coauthor of Portfolio Life (Wiley) and co-editor of Taking Faith Seriously (Harvard University Press).
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