Local poet Kathie Fiveash has written a wonderful new book of poems about FLCA. Broad Brook, poems from Fitzgerald Lake is available for sale for $15 with all proceeds going to Broad Brook Coalition.
Kathie Fiveash’s book is available at Collective Copies in Florence and online at Leveller’s Press.
From the jacket
This book is an expression of gratitude for a beautiful place, Fitzgerald Lake in Florence, Massachusetts. All proceeds from sales will benefit the Broad Brook Coalition, a non-profit organization which manages The Fitzgerald Lake Conservation Area in collaboration with the Northampton Conservation Commission. The Coalition’s work is guided by its mission to preserve and expand the Fitzgerald Lake Conservation Area. Its responsibilities include trail maintenance, natural history education programs, pasture mowing, invasive plant control, native shrub planting, and water quality analysis on what is currently 852 acres of forest, meadow, wetland, and lake. All the poems in this book had their genesis in walks throughout the seasons at Fitzgerald Lake.
Earthbound (poem excerpt from the book)
Sitting under trees as evening falls
over the lake, I watch the gentle veils
of twilight sway and settle over pale
luminous water, insubstantial shawls
that dim the air thick with peeper song.
Silent beavers trail their wakes, at peace
before their work. Day’s remnants cease
to cling. What’s here is only what belongs.
What belongs is everywhere and all–
that heron stalking frogs, this cankered leaf,
this sprouting seed, my body come to grief,
the mourning cloak in flight, these ants that crawl
through the leaf litter on their orderly way
home to their nest. The overarching sky
fades and cools. Shadows ramify.
I slip into the last embrace of day,
into the arms of all things that enfold me,
the arms of earth, the only arms that hold me.
Kathie Fiveash is a naturalist, teacher, homesteader, and writer. She divides her year between Florence, Massachusetts and Isle au Haut, Maine, a remote, unbridged island in Penobscot Bay. She is the author of Island Naturalist, an award-winning book of essays about natural history on the coast of Maine published by Penobscot Bay Press; and of Earthbound, a chapbook of poems published by the Gallery of Readers Press. Kathie has generously offered to donate the proceeds of the sale of Broad Brook: Poems from Fitzgerald Lake to Broad Brook Coalition.