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New Hampshire Poet Showcase
From NH Poet Laureate, Walter E. Butts

At my request, the NH Arts Council is providing me with a link to the poet laureate page on their website in order that I may continue to showcase poems by a number of New Hampshire Poets. The poets will be by my invitation only, but I plan to include those who are seriously working at their craft from many areas of the state.

Featured Poet: Diana Durham,  Portsmouth

Diana DurhamDiana Durham is a poet and writer, author of two poetry collections, 'Sea of Glass' (Diamond Press, London), and 'To the End of the Night' (Northwoods Press, Maine, winner of their annual competition) and the non-fiction book 'The Return of King Arthur: finishing the quest for wholeness' (Tarcher/Penguin).   She was Assistant Producer on the primetime network series 'Dinner on the Diner' for PBS.  She runs workshops on the leadership implications of the Arthurian myths.  Current projects include a radio play, ‘Perceval & the Grail’, a series of 55 sonnets and a new non-fiction book exploring the ethics of spiritual identity.   Diana is a graduate of University College London, with a BA in English Literature, and is currently a Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center.  

We were visiting Bath in Maine, and took a walk through a newly made trail by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust that went up along the Whiskeag Creek, one of the tributaries of the Kennebec River.  It was raining.   Something about the rain on the water, and the unexpected wide expanse of land and water that could be glimpsed into the distance got me in touch with that extraordinary quality of North America, which perhaps as a English woman, I am more susceptible to than those born and bred here, the sense of unending space, land, water,  emptiness, bounty, grace, the vastness, the minuteness of scale and instead this time of feeling slightly overwhelmed by it, I felt excitement gratitude, wonder, and at the same time, a line came to me about language being a net, and somehow the wonder of it being able to continuously stretch out with our thought into this endlessness, the infinite universe.  
     

Endless

language is a great net, fine as fine grey
rain threading grey skies, wooded water ways          
of the Whiskeag Creek’s wide tributary
where over and over the rain lines say

something almost the same, just in case this           
can be caught, or glimpsed intermittently
slipping along the trail, in a phrase
that captures miles, years of territory

it will stretch out as far as thought will go -
a mesh of lichen blooms, small pink moss lace
patterning the granite - it might just know
all this, it might just reach as far as space 

it might just keep saying endless, endless
the rain on a grey creek, the spread of trees


Whiskeag Creek Trail, Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
by Whiskeag Creek, tributary to the Kennebec River,
near Bath, Maine

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Click here for a list of previous Poet Showcases

Last updated: November 16, 2011

 
 
 
 
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