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About the Book

Catherine Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it’s there—in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts—that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the Catskills, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England’s early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau’s narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to “the living earth,” a new way of seeing things.

Vert is an old word in danger of being lost or misunderstood “In English forest law,” it’s “everything that grows and forms a green leaf, serving as cover for deer.” It’s suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spinney of a brother’s memory.

About the Author

Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review, POETRY, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review and others. Awards include the Guy Owen, a McGovern Poetry Prize, and a Walter Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.