Search results for ""Author Leland Kinsey""

Winter Ready is a 96-page collection of new poems by a Vermont-based writer who draws from his impressive repertoire of observations and physical landscape of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to bring to the reader poems with universal meaning and at times a painful acuity. Kinsey opens the collection perched up high on the chimney top, working and observing his surroundings, and throughout the book, he never really gets down-he chronicles a people and a place and a time-and keeps the hard work of writing poetry hidden in the seeming effortless verse that is often funny and poignant, yet always sharp and clear. In this new collection by a renowned Vermont poet, the setting is the same, but the voice rings true to the people and the land they inhabit, always respectful of the native peoples who came before and the awesome power of a glacier that carved a path in its wake. These poems evoke a fully realized view of the world the poet inhabits, an awareness of labor and its changing nature. The book moves through poem after glowing poem, evoking natural history, flora and fauna, with a place-based and focused attention.

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Leland Kinsey, often referred to as the poet laureate of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, died of cancer on September 14, 2016. He was sixty-six years old. Having recently published a volume of his much-celebrated collected poems (Galvanized, Green Writers Press, 2016), Leland left behind two manuscripts: Last Correspondence, and an untitled sequence of poems, many written or revised during his last illness. This volume is a posthumous compilation of those two collections.Last Correspondence, which was written over a period of four decades, is a rich poetic narrative, in letter format, between friends, lovers, and family members. Ranging from the vast deserts and ranches of the American Southwest, to the mountains and hillside farms of northern Vermont, and on to Labrador's taiga, with side excursions to Machu Picchu and the Isle of Skye, Last Correspondence evokes on every page Emerson's definition of "the kingly bard" who "must smite the chords rudely and hard." Then come the incomparable “Final Poems,” a cascade of stories, characters, and images, mostly from the Northeast Kingdom, and focusing on the recurrent themes of family, work, and place, which have run through Kinsey's poems from the start. Walt Whitman would have loved these poems, so, too, Robert Frost. They represent the finest works of a writer who will always be known as the truest voice of the remote and beautiful "kingdom" of Vermont settled by his Scottish ancestors seven generations ago, and preserved, in perpetuity, in hundreds of the most human and original poems in the history of American letters.

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