Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA marvelous new collection of poems deeply rooted in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and rural life in general. All of Leland Kinsey's poetry is closely connected to the natural world, with its expert (and highly entertaining) use of history, stories, characters - many from Leland Kinsey's own family and ancestors - and images from nature, rural work and avocations, and the traditions of a very harsh but authentic, off-the-beaten track Vermont. His new collection, WINTER READY, is a chronicle, in poems, of the preparations for winter in the Northeast Kingdom, of a contemporary, rural narrator inextricably connected to the Kingdom, his family past and present, and the natural world. -- Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger in the Kingdom
Winter Ready by Vermont poet, Leland Kinsey, is just beautiful. Such deep and reverent knowledge of place - the flora, the fauna, the history - and all of those particulars wedded to the poet's own experience through a language that is both musical and precise. I think I will be reading this many times, and can't wait to see it in book form. -- Robin MacArthur, author
For his entire artistic life, Leland Kinsey has been chronicling the profoundest Vermont anyone might possibly know. Native son, he has an eye for the telling physical detail (I am especially taken, for example, by 'Upland Birds'), which he always renders with nonpareil accuracy. But within his vivid sensory world there also lies what I must far too roughly describe as traditional Vermont's spiritual history. Pure and even cruel factuality, elegy, resolution, loss and affirmation - all these qualities fuse in poems like 'Turkey Butcher,' 'Picking Stone,' 'Horseshoeing,' on and on. One walks away from each of these marvels, as from every last poem in WINTER READY, with a sense not only of having been instructed but in some ineffable manner, renewed, even sanctified. -- Sydney Lea, Vermont state poet laureate
