by Elizabeth R. McCarthy

PSOV Board Member & NEPC Member

Last Sunday, June 22nd, I braved the heat and ventured south at the invite of the New England Poetry Club to read at The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts as part of their summer series, Poetry at the Manse, joining poets Catherine Staples and José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes.

Catherine Staples began the reading with poems from Vert (2024, Mercer University Press.) Her poems seemed to have found the perfect venue at The Old Manse, surrounded in nature and history.

Vert is an old word in danger of being lost, “In English forest law,” it’s “everything that grows and forms a green leafy, serving as cover for deer,” It’s suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spiney of a brother’s memory.
~ Catherine Staples

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes read several poems from his book Present Values, (2018, Backbone Press,) winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Reyes poetry explores culture and identity through the lense of value, particularly in the context of capitalism and its impact on individuals and society. Again, what better place than The Old Manse for poems as rich and thought provoking as “Present Values” where Transcendentalists; Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott and Thoreau would cheer.

a few lines from “Present Values“

From their towers
little gods wage wars,

deploying their red currencies,

"Mine,"
      "Yours,"
             Couched in possession,

It was an honor to be invited by the New England Poetry Club and join such esteemed poets as Catherine and Jose,’ and to read several of my poems from Wild Silence (2024 Kelsay Books,) as well as more recent poems. I began with “Tree of Solitude” inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.

Tree of Solitude

“in the midst of the crowd keep with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude…”
 ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance 

tis an awakening to see oneself
among the many trees in the forest

standing in the shadows of greatness
on a midsummer morning

when sunlight streaks past
with its sharp edged rays

like a blade of shining glory
cutting through the falsity

of the forest for the trees

Ending the reading with “My Afterlife Plans”…