Blainville Testament: Narrative Poems

by Sydney Lea

Overview

This grand collection of poetic narratives by a versatile New England poet/novelist/naturalist demonstrates that his muscular meditative line can be potently adapted to telling the stories we most hope to hear. These poems form a vivid portrait of a compelling region and salt-of-the-earth characters that moves in step with the work of other Vermont poets, such as David Budbill and Hayden Carruth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684752331
Publisher:	Down East Books
Publication date:	04/07/2026
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review andwas Vermont’s poet laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, Lea is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, and for more than four decades he taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, and Wesleyan colleges and was, for thirteen of those, on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has long been active in conservation, especially in Maine, where he led two campaigns that conserved over 400,000 acres, 60,000 of which became community forest in one of the state’s poorest counties. In 2012, he was named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream magazine. He is married with five children and seven grandchildren and lives in Newbury, Vermont.