Poetry Anthology

COMPASS ROADS

A Straw Dog Writers Guild Poetry Anthology

Sixty-two poets and over a hundred new poems

offer a lyrical map of our Valley.

From the Introduction by Editor Jane Yolen

“So many places in the Valley are poems to me. I have lived in Northampton, Conway, and Hatfield, but poetry doesn’t just reside there. Poems seem to drop from the apple orchards, rise up in the cornfields. They lie beneath the snow emerging first as blue-flowered snowdrops. They grow under the white nettings over tobacco crops. They sail on the rivers, and tumble over the gorges, make the rounds of the Oxbow. They clack behind the wheels of the Vermonter as it stops twice a day in Northampton. They shudder each time a too-large truck goes under Northampton’s truck-eating bridge. They pause by Sojourner Truth’s statue, enjoy the Smith College greenhouse in February, nod at the mastodon in the Amherst College Museum, follow the dinosaur tracks in the shale along the Connecticut. I hear more than just Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost in all the passing winds.”