As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has
been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the
international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has
combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic
farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and
diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy
human communities.
Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds,
tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this
lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his
perspective--as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his
development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the
Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal
relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning
to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting
with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall's ancient landscape
of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an
international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading
ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of
Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women
harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long
Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under
the canopy of an American beech.
"Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of
the Atlantic"--words that describe his prose as well as his vision of
connectedness--Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of
hope and regeneration.
