$22.95
Softcover, Maine Literature
ISBN: 0-9618592-2-9
Temporarily out of stock
ABOUT THE BOOK
From Sarah Orne Jewett to Stephen King, from a Passamaquoddy legend to Tim Sample, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to E.B. White, this book is a treasure chest of Maine fiction, poetry, essays, legends and more. Spanning centuries, genres and topics, the more than 100 selections offer something for everyone. The differing visions of Maine provide readers with new ways of understanding the essence of our great state and its remarkable people.
REVIEWS "Nowhere is the culture more truly reflected than in the mirror of its enduring literature. Maine is blessed with a literary tradition unsurpassed in the nation – and a lucky thing this is, too, in a time of widespread change... You will find all you need to know between these covers."
– University of Southern Maine professor Richard E. Barringer
AMONG THE CONTRIBUTORS to Maine Speaks
Margaret Dickson
Elizabeth Ogilvie
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Samuel French Morse
Samuel de Champlain
Elizabeth Coatsworth
Helen Hamlin
Elizabeth Spear
John McPhee
Ruth Moore
Philip Booth
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
May Sarton
Lew Dietz
Marsden Hartley
William Clark
Tim Sample
Henry David Thoreau
Erskine Caldwell
and many more.
EXCERPT from Maine Speaks The Day The Tide
By Philip Booth
“ The day the tide went out,
and stayed, not just at Mean
Low Water or Spring Ebb,
but out, out all the way
perhaps as far as Spain,
until the bay was empty.
It left us looking down
at what the sea, and our
reflections on it, had
(for generations of
good fish, and wives fair
as vessels) saved us from.
We watched our fishboats ground
themselves, limp-chained in mud;
careened, as we still are
(though they lie far below us)
against this sudden slope
that once looked like a harbor.
We're level, still, with islands,
or what's still left of them
now that the treelines invert:
the basin foothills rock
into view like defeated castles,
with green and a flagpole on top.
Awkward as faith itself,
heron still stand on one leg
in trenches the old tide cut;
maybe they know what the moon's
about, working its gravity
off the Atlantic shelf.
Blind as starfish, we
look into our dried reservoir
of disaster: fouled trawls, old
ships hung up on their mon-
ument ribs; the skeletons
of which of fathers were master.
We salt such bones down with self-
consolation, left to survive,
if we will, on this emptied slope.
Reunion Radio keeps reporting
How our ebb finally flooded
The terrible Cape of Good Hope.
”
