During this third year of COVID, Susan and I designed, built (well, we didn’t do the actual building!), and furnished a guest house across the dirt road and up the hill from our 200 year old farmhouse in Vermont where we’ve spent a good part of our lives during the last 35 years.  The process was, to use a much over-used phrase, transformative, as we learned about framing, roofing, septic  systems, artesian wells and much more. Seeing the tiny, tight, beautiful building go from a hole in the ground to a finished dwelling with our favorite art on the walls and where we can welcome our family and friends was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

In the midst of that process, friends gave us this book which they had discovered at a library book sale inscribed by strangers named Elaine and Paul and in perfect condition.  What a great find and gift!  The book pairs a painting, drawing, collage, fabric piece, or photograph with a poem, all referring to the experience of home.

Opening the book I found some of my favorite poets and artists, sometimes paired and sometimes with other partners, new to me.  Robert Creeley and Donald Hall, Vermont favorites, were paired with Charles Burchfield and a pictorial rug from the late 19th C; Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams were paired with a painting of a Caribbean house by Rafael Ferrer and a photograph by the editor’s wife.  W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Robinson Jeffers (with a photo of the Tor House in Carmel), Yeats, Neruda, and Allen Ginsberg are among this diverse group of poets while my favorite art object, even more prized than the work of Hopper and Chagall,  is a woodcut by Vermont’s Mary Azarian, paired with The House in Winter by another favorite, Jane Hirshfield. .

I’m usually not a fan of poetry collections (e.g. One Hundred Poems to Clean Your Closet) but this one is just about perfect.  Interestingly, the editor is not a poet or even a writer, but creative director for Lands End!  He’s done a fine job and you can find some of these poems at www.poetryonthecharles.net.  I’ll finish with one quote from the first poem in the book, Robert Creeley’s This House which ends with this stanza:  “You are my mind/made particular, my heart in its place.”