I have featured Mary Oliver so many times that I feel she needs no introduction. I enjoy how she provides a window into little, often-overlooked aspects of the natural world. Maye, we all need to stop, look, and appreciate more often. It is possible, I suppose that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough to be perfectly content not knowing. Song being born of quest he knows this:…

Frances Cornford was born on March 30, 1886 into the Darwin-Wedgewood family. She was privately educated and showed early talent as a writer. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1908. Cornford went on to publish several other volumes of poetry. She was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1959. The spirits of children are remote and wise, They must go free Like fishes in the sea Or starlings in the skies, Whilst you remain The shore where casually they come again. But when there falls the stalking shade of fear, You must be suddenly near, You, the unstable, must become a tree In whose unending heights of…

Robert Morgan is an American poet and novelist. He was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and draws on Appalachian culture in his poetry and prose. He lives in New York State and teaches English and creative writing at Cornell University. Morgan’s novel, Gap Creek was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club in 2000. She had always loved to read, even in childhood during the Confederate War, and built the habit of staying up by the oil lamp near the fireplace after husband and children slept, the scrub-work done. She fed the addiction in the hard years of Reconstruction and even after her husband died…