Books
Walking Woodstock
Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town
by Michael Perkins
and Will Nixon
Illustrated by Carol Zaloom #1 Paperback Bestseller of 2009, Golden Notebook, Woodstock, NY
The Pocket Guide to Woodstock
An Insiders' Guide with Suggested Hikes, a Walking Tour of the Historic Village, Maps, Photographs, and the Best Tips for a Memorable Visit
by Michael Perkins
and Will Nixon
Illustrated by Carol Zaloom #1 Paperback Bestseller of 2012, Golden Notebook, Woodstock, NYBooks
Books
Poetry
Poetry
Poetry
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Quotes
“Are you familiar with the writing of Woodstock poet Will Nixon? If not, you should be because of his funny, wistful, poignant poems.”
-- Catskill Mountain Region Guide“The Hudson Valley has produced some of the great peregrinations of our time, most notably by John Burroughs, an inveterate walker. Add Michael Perkins and Will Nixon to the list—these are charming essays, some of them with a bit more bite than you'd guess.”
-- Bill McKibben
In Praise of Overwriting (If you’re Gerard Manley Hopkins)
(The Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins died age forty five in 1889, leaving behind poems that weren’t published for another thirty years, when his efforts to reinvigorate poetry that had been trapped in Victorian decorum and predictable traditional meters were finally recognized as genius. Not only did Hopkins create his own poetic cadences, but he had a fantastic eye for nature. In a biographical sketch of Hopkins from Lives of the Poets: The story of of one thousand years of English and American poetry, Louis Untermeyer made the following observation:)
Hopkins was not only God-intoxicated but image-drunken. He used metaphors as explosively as Van Gogh used paint; his poems reel with comparisons which rush recklessly from one implication to another. A mountain brook is “a darksome burn, horseback brown,” a “rollrock highroad roaring down”; stars are “firefolk sitting in the air” or “flake-doves sent forth at a farmyard scare:’ “silk-sack clouds” are like “meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies”; aspen trees have “airy cages” which “quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun”; the thrush’s song “through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing,” and the lark pours out its music “till none’s to spill nor spend.” It did not take a rainbow to make Hopkins’ heart leap up. He was all amazement at the ordinary sight of thrush’s eggs “like little low heavens,” of a stream with its “wide-wandering weed-winding bank,” and weeds themselves “in wheels, long and lovely and lush.” Even an old horseshoe was to him a “bright and battering sandal.”