Church of the Robin's Ha-Ha!

Auteur

Anne Richey lives and teaches in New York's Hudson Valley. She was introduced to John Burroughs through the Slabsides Poets, a writers' group which met periodically at Slabsides, Burroughs' cabin in West Park, NY. She has been reading, studying, and teaching him ever since. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, among them Barrow Street, Poetry Midwest, Primavera, Long Island Quarterly, The Sow's Ear, and JAMA. They have been anthologized in the collections Prima Materia, Vanguard Voices of the Hudson Valley, WaterWrites, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, and Boomer Girls: Poems from the Baby Boom Generation. She is a docent at Woodchuck Lodge, Burroughs' summer retreat in Roxbury, NY.

Texte du rabat

Church of the Robin's Ha-Ha!, the title poem of this collection, underscores John Burroughs' essentially religious connection to nature. For the famed Catskill naturalist and writer, "heaven on earth" was no mere cliché, but a reality. His parents' Calvinist preoccupation with the heaven to come, seemed to him tragically misguided and counter-productive. Still, as Anne Richey reminds us, Burroughs' love for the earth was tempered by eyes determinedly wide open: yes, bird song enchants us, but somewhere a snake is devouring a baby bird. In other poems, all set in the Catskills, Richey keeps faith with Burroughs' devotion to the near-at-hand - the sunlit and the dark: a doting mother photographs her two boys, a dog cowers in fear, a man appears to walk on water . . .