Sherry Chandler

PoetGuy

At a time when the country seems over-run with SUVs plastered with support-our-troops ribbons in yellow, red-white-and-blue, camouflage, and pink (!), when a country supposedly outraged by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction settles (together of course) on the couch to watch Desperate Housewives, when a poor country girl like me can get really confused, it’s comforting to remember that the United States can still produce a Thoreau-esque poet-guy like Michael Czarnecki. You’ll find a nice article in the Bar Harbor Times about Michael and his family, how they spend their summers in upstate New York and their winters on an island off the coast of Maine, how they work together as FootHills Publishing to make fine handsewn poetry books. (And if you go to the article, check out what looks like a heewwwgge tree behind Michael. Seeing that, I can understand why a body might go north from New York for the winter.)

FootHills will celebrate its twentieth anniversary soon, and the enterprise seems to be going strong. You will find My Will and Testament Is on the Desk at FootHills, along with Ann Lederer’s Approaching Freeze, and a fine book by Patricia Monaghan, also an honorary Kentucky poet, called Homefront. I know the high quality of these books and so would assume that you’ll find many others just as good. Go and browse around, and while you’re there, check out Michael’s new book, Sea Smoke and Sand Dollars.

My poem this week is from My Will and Testament Is on the Desk. Even though March seems to be coming in like a lion here in Kentucky (though no snow here in Ruddles Mill yet), it is coming in, which means spring is inevitable. And so I have chosen the one springish, rather cheerful poem from that overall autumnal, elegaic collection — “Tulips.” (I don’t have any, I think the moles ate my bulbs years ago, but the early daffodils by the south wall of the house are in full bloom. I think they’ll even survive this freeze, being protected.)

Addendum: Michael says his son Grayson is actually almost 14, though the article says 12.

Related posts:

Michael Czarnecki

May and December

A house on Wheeler Hill

Books

Artcroft Hike

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