Cover Art: Seven Tines by Martin Bridge
LandTrust by Katherine Hagopian Berry
A poetry colle`ction now available!
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About LandTrust…….
In Maine, people are either “from here,” born and raised, or “from away.” In LandTrust, Katherine Hagopian Berry explores what it means to learn the language of a place. Spiraling out from themes of displacement, alienation, loss and futility, LandTrust concludes by celebrating connection, kinship and belonging. These are poems that embody how to listen deeply to land: the land you find yourself loving, the land you find yourself on.
Praise for LandTrust:
LandTrust is a field guide to a renewed relationship with place. Each poem in this book, written as its own beautiful journey, offers a way into an exploration. Not just of the many places that Hagopian Berry writes about, but into our own inner landscapes. As we move through the poems on the page, we also journey through the ways we think about and see land and ourselves. LandTrust is an elegantly written, personal invitation to recovering our oldest relationship. This book has to power to heal – as we restore our own inner landscapes, we are moved to restore the land.
- CMarie Fuhrman, Director of Poetry, Graduate Program in Creative Writing, Western Colorado University
Katherine Hagopian Berry’s LandTrust builds a poignant bridge between the natural and human worlds, steadily enlarging a relationship of trust – of empathy, and fidelity – between the human voice and the land/earth. Hagopian Berry’s words carry a devotion of watching and listening, a language that transcends the Anthropocene point of view, as she pursues with luminous heart and intelligence the question of “How to make this earth my own.” There is a sense of enchantment to these poems that touch the earth “like red embers burning, the sounding, our voices, the bright bringing dawn.” LandTrust repays repeated readings, just as the land itself repays faithful returns.
- Claire Millikin, author of Dolls (2Leaf Press, 2021)
In LandTrust, poems wind and unwind in spirals, from heartbreak to healing, from the extinction of species to mud season in Maine. With clarity and skill, the speaker explores her position in our environmental crisis. Hagopian Berry asks: Imagine me / standing like a dragonfly / at your shoulder. With devastating humor – The ivory-billed woodpecker was declared extinct today / which is why I threw a fit about paper napkins – the reader is held gently. In this startling collection, Hagopian Berry’s poems expose our vulnerabilities but ultimately name our power and give us breath.
- Robert Carr, author of The Unbuttoned Eye (3: A Taos Press, 2019)