ROOTS: THE COMMUNITY OF PLACE
In Spring of 2010, The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, directed by Houck Medford, founder, and Phil Francis, Superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway in the National Park Service, named me the first Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway for the poems I wrote comprising The Soul Tree. This is the first time in American History that a poet and a bio-region have been formally connected.
The Soul Tree is a gentle treatise on change as it occurs both in nature and in human emotional states. Written after I'd spent three years reading the world's sacred texts exploring their use of natural metaphor, it is my Tao te Chi inspired by John Fletcher Jr.'s pictures of the Appalachian Wilderness. It is also an elegy for the hemlocks as they die and decay back into the earth as a result of the wooly adelgid infestations we have been unable to stop. Most of all, the collection is my melding, through worlds, with the land I've moved to three times in my adult life. www.thesoultree.org.
Laura Hope-Gill
Visit the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics: http://www.geopoetics.org.uk/
More titles that bring the world together:
The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi
A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery by Lyndy Abraham
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Elements of Geopoetics by Kenneth White
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences Edited by Brewster Ghiselin
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde