Lunar XIII by Martin Bridge

Writing the Land: Wanderings I

This anthology is a collection of conserved lands from across the North American continent. Each of 11 chapters contains poems, photos, and information about actual conserved properties from a land conservation organization. They celebrate the beauty and value of lands of all kinds including forests, islands, farms, caves, and rivers. Explore lands you've not yet seen, or re-explore familiar territory through art. Either way, we hope you are inspired.

Participating Partners:

Presumpscot Regional Land Conservancy (ME)

Palouse Land Trust (ID)

Appalachia Ohio Alliance (OH)

Freeport Conservation Trust (ME)

Howard County Conservancy (MD)

Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust (ME)

The Nature Conservancy-Missouri (MI)

Forterra (WA)

Blue Hill Heritage Trust (ME)

Marin Agricultural Land Trust (CA)

Dharmakaya Center (NY)

Praise for Writing the Land: Wanderings I

Writing the Lands: Wanderings I is a feast of imagery evoking memories, histories, geographies, and living entities. In 11 ecologically vital places in North America, poets capture the resilience and fragility of life, and as poet Ryan Kegley notes, it is in these places that one becomes a “witness to deep time.”  This book invites us to escape the chaos of our contemporary world, to leave behind the “clutter and clatter” of the everyday, and to rediscover both nature and ourselves. 

— Mary Brancaccio, author of Fierce Geometry: Poems

 What you are holding in your hands is not just poetry. It's wildness, mountains, hills, and valleys. Pick up this book and be transported from Washington to Maine, and from Tennessee to New York, and enjoy what makes America most beautiful.

—Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey, Associate Professor of English, Norwich University

Come, friends, herein you will find “bee kin” and “foxglove spires” in whose midst you may “seek the seeds of wild.”  Scent the “vanilla of sweet grass” and linger over a “drip of beard lichen from branches.” From hemlock forests to blueberry barrens to coastal rivers, Writing the Land: Wanderings I abounds with a treasury of reasons we need more sustainable practices and change.

—Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert

Writing the Land: Wanderings I connects poems with their places. Under the auspices of sponsoring land trusts and conservancies, poets celebrate the local landscapes they hold dear. In a virtuosic range of voice and form, they restore the look and touch and spirit of the land that is lost in the abstraction of contemporary experience.

——Jonathan Cannon, author of Environment in the Balance, Blaine Phillips Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law Emeritus, University of Virginia School of Law