Publisher's Synopsis
IN LOVE WITH YOUR PLACE is a collection of 62 poems written over a twenty-year period with a few initial poems from fifty years back. Poems are presented in four chapters: There Are Words, Birds Seem To Know You, The Footbridge, and Rivers Have A Heart. The poems spring from places inhabited by the author, landscapes of deep attachment where he was born as well as places he has resided or worked as a landscape architect and conservation planner. Although these places include Alaska's Susitna Basin, the Salish Sea Estuary, the Sonoran Desert, Kentucky's Inner Bluegrass, the Georgia Piedmont, Peru's Antiplano, Chile's Tierra del Fuego, South Wales, Ireland, and the Amazon River, the majority spring from the Okanogan Country north of the Big Bend of the Columbia - especially Coyote Springs Farm at the mouth of the canyon of the Little Mosquito where he now resides. "Landscapes have always reached out to me. I feel the passion for life inside them, and this has given me the words to become very attached to the landscapes of my Mother Earth. Like all living things, landscapes need partners. They need caretakers to appreciate their expressiveness and stewards to reciprocate with them to increase their energy and fullness at every scale from the garden to the region. I put this book together to celebrate my love affair with the landscape and to capture the magnetism possible between its partners. The title pretty much says it all. This book is not a book of love poetry, although there are a few poems in it that I wrote to women I loved. The land gives me a voice, so this book also contains a few poems written by particular landscapes toward their surrounding landscapes, as well as poems between particular landscapes and particular people. Every landscape has its code, and if you fall in love with it and give it a voice, the poems you unearth from it will forever give you a place to stand as partner and friend and lover." The book includes sketches by the author and his wife Chong and a photo of the author.
