Where the Deer Were

Pastoral, narrative, deliberately lyrical, the poetry of Kate Barnes is set solidly in the rural Maine countryside, and in the literary tradition in which is was raised (her father was Henry Beston, her mother Elizabeth Coatsworth). There she lives near the house that Beston made famous in Northern Farm, drawing strength and inspiration from the coastal landscape to steady her through the changing seasons of life.

This is wise and moving verse: not abstract or self-consciously 'modern,' but clean and convincing verse, as Robert Creeley has commented, 'of a deep and heartfelt clarity.' These are poems that examine and celebrate the ingredients of our humanity: friendship and wonder, loneliness and endurance, sexuality and unrequited longing, familial ties and the overriding relationship of the individual to nature, to landscape and animals, and to the living earth itself.