Poems for a Penny

I'm so enjoying The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Fowler this morning--and just ordered The Fairytale Girl by Susan Branch.

In The Penny Poet, A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship, Fowler befriends an eccentric poet in Portsmouth named Robert Dunn.  I'm only halfway through the book, but I'm liking the way she focuses her memoir on this relationship with a quirky poet who sells his books of poetry for a penny, then becomes the poet laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

At one point, the whole town is bemoaning the closing of small town stories and their replacement by chain stores:

"Robert recognized that change was inevitable while understanding that it made no difference, not to what really mattered. The shining of light through language on the darker corners of human existence was important.  Literature with the power to move and instruct people, to comfort them and make them laugh, to illuminate the beautiful and horrible, stood outside time. The rest was essentially gossip."

She writes, too, about her own struggles with writing as she works on her novels, balancing her marriage and social life with her need for solitude:

"The dining table where I sometimes sit to write has a view of the backyard and the pond.  Some days I am starting at a blue stretch of water as I search for the right words; other days it's a cratered sea of mud.  Both have their beauty, making a space at the foot of the lawn that has no other purpose. This would be news to the gulls and ducks and herons who forage for food there, but in my human world, the pond seems to be there simply to rest the eye. The water can't be built upon or walked across.  How few things in modern life bring us back to beauty and nothing else?"