Poetry Reading with Christian Barter

Description

The Wendell Gilley Museum and the Southwest Harbor Public Library are teaming up to host poet and park ranger Christian Barter to the Museum on Tuesday, Sept. 23 from 5:30 to 6:30pm as part of an occasional series called Reading with Wings. An award-winning poet, Barter explores nature and human nature in his verse, and he has a critically lauded new collection called “The Ends” that he will share that night. In “The Ends,” Barter explores both the landscape of Maine and the lives lived there. In “Champlain,” a poem that imagines the discovery of Mount Desert Island where Barter has lived most of his life, and in “Acadia,” a poem written in honor of the park, he addresses the issue of our stewardship of the earth; in a series of sonnets dedicated to the outsider artist James Hampton, he explores what it means to devote a lifetime to the creation of a work of art. “These are the poems of a writer sure of his craft and at the height of his skill,” says Jeffrey Thomson, author of “Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory.” Barter has served as poet laureate of Acadia National Park, and works on the trail crew for Acadia National Park planning and overseeing construction and rehabilitation of hiking trails. His first book The Singers I Prefer was a Lenore Marshall Prize finalist; his second, In Someone Else's House, was the winner of the 2014 Maine Literary Award for Poetry; Bye-bye Land, a book-length poem, was published by BOA Editions in early 2017 and won the Isabella Gardner Prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, The American Scholar, Epoch and other magazines, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and The Writer's Almanac.