num_pages: 304
description: 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 between planning the rotations of fields ordering seeds and supplies and watching the weather Chaskey was always writing poetic stanzas or pages to piece together a book. 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 stopping to taste blackberries and linger in the heather before meeting Seamus Heaney and farming in Cornwalls ancient landscape of granite bramble and twisted trees. Later in life 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 in the shade of an ancient beech tree. Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlanticwords that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectednessScott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration in a time of widespread despair.
language: English
title: Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life
publisher: Milkweed Editions