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