From Publishers Weekly
Every year, a poet is invited to take up residence at an endowed residence in Franconia, New Hampshire. The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, Volume One collects work from over 20 years of resident poets, including Robert Hass, Mary Ruefle, Denis Johnson, Luci Tapahonso and many others. Donald Hall, of Eagle Pond Farm, provides a short foreword on the house; its executive director (could Frost have imagined it?) Donald Sheehan introduces the poets. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Volume I of a two-volume collection of literary gifts, including poems, essays, and reminiscences honoring Robert Frost, poetry, art, and community from 24 prominent American poets, who were selected to live in Robert Frost's Franconia, New Hampshire home. Proceeds from the sale of the book will help support Frost Place programs.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Forward by Donald HallVolume 1 of a two volume millenium collection of literary gifts including poems, essays, reminiscences and photographs honoring Robert Frost, poetry, art, and community from 24 prominent American poets, each of whom was selected to live in Robert Frost`s Franconia, New Hampshire home. Included are:Katha Pollitt, Robert Haas, Gary Miranda, William Matthews,Mary Jo Salter, Cleopatra Mathis, Dennis Johnson, Sherod Santos,Kathy Fagan, Christopher Gilbert, Pattiann Rogers, John Engels,Julie Agoos, Rosanna Warren, Stanley Plumbly, Robert Cording,Sharon Bryan, Mark Halliday, Luci Tapahonso, Jeffrey Skinner,David Graham, Sue Ellen Thompson, Mary Rueffle, Mark Cox Excerpt of Forward by Donald Hall: `When Robert Frost was introduced as a farmer poet, he stuck out his hands, palms up: these aren`t a farmer`s hands, he would say. Famously, he declared that once a man had made a metaphor, it unfitted him for other work. Frost had his chosen work, and we are thankful for it. He consecrated his whole life to the art of poetry. When I met him, in August of 1945 he seemed to rise from the ground like a stone figure. He was not stone, but he endured with the firmness of granite, obdurate in devotion to the art he loved. `.Young poetry is the breath of parted lips. For spirit to survive, the mouth must find how to firm and not to harden.` To firm and not to harden. In Franconia`s Frost Place, young poets learn to firm their mouths without hardening their hearts. From its beginning in 1977, the Frost Place has celebrated the ongoingness of American poetry. Great poems were written in this house. Poetry flourished there then and it flourishes therenow.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

From the category of poems most people might actually want to read comes this anthology of beautifully conceived and artfully made verse from writers invited to the Frost Place residency program during the years 1977-2000. The idea is to gather poets whose literary lives are about where Frost's life was in 1915, when he bought a farm in New Hampshire and, during his subsequent five-year stay, produced some of his greatest work. When Frost arrived, he was forty, fresh from a disappointing visit to England and just enjoying the publications of A Boy's Will and North of Boston. In addition to writing a brief foreword, Hall chooses a sample from Mountain Interval (1916) to set the scene, and what follows is a rich, satisfying anthology of the early work of twenty-four wonderful poets. Editors Davison and Sheehan have provided a generous selection of work from such notables as Katha Pollitt, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Mary Jo Salter, Pattiann Rogers and Stanley Plumly. In a time when so much praise is lavished on cerebral poetry, these works recall the tradition of writing for the mind and the heart. ￯﾿ﾽStephen Whited

Publishers Weekly