Northern Voices: Forty Years on the Poetry Beat

SKU: 9780872333772

“I am blessed to have known the poets who are the subjects of this memoir,” Mike Pride wrote in his Acknowledgments. “They have enriched my life, and I have done my best to represent them as I knew them.” In two straightforward sentences, Pride captured both the spirit that animates this book and the journalistic sensibilities he brought to writing it. Northern Voices explores the work of six remarkable poets, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic, Wesley McNair, and Sharon Olds, all contemporaries, and the ways in which their artistry was shaped by the natural beauties and hard realities of life in New Hampshire. Readers will also meet Seamus Heaney and Hayden Carruth, and come away—just as the author did—enriched by the experience.

Author: Mike Pride was a distinguished journalist, writer, and historian. For more than thirty years, he ran the newsroom of the Concord Monitor, lifting the newspaper to national prominence. He emerged from retirement to serve as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, only to retire again when he developed a blood cancer. He wrote, co-wrote, or edited eight previous books and completed the manuscript for this book, his ninth, in the months before his death in April 2023 at the age of seventy-six. His previous books dealt most often with the human experience of war, grounded in the Civil War and World War II. Northern Voices is his most personal book, grounded instead in his love of poetry.
(Hardcover, 248 pages)