Bookshelf
Poetic License book cover
Poetic License on an old piece of paper
Gretchen Cherington ’83, ’86G
She Writes Press
August 2020
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n the surface, Gretchen Cherington’s childhood was the stuff of idyll. Growing up in Hanover, New Hampshire, she’d regularly come home from school to find literary luminaries such as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton visiting with her equally famous father, Dartmouth professor and New Hampshire poet laureate Richard Eberhart. She spent summers at Undercliff, a Maine cottage at the edge of Penobscot Bay, where her father piloted a boat called Reve and she and her brother Dikkon annually reenacted their parents’ love story to an indulgent beachfront crowd. There were also two years in Washington, D.C., while her father served as the poet laureate of the United States, and a year in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 16-year-old Cherington traveled to study and perfect her French.

But like so many other idylls, the romanticized veneer covered a complex reality: Cherington’s mother suffered from intractable epilepsy, and from a young age she often found herself in the role of her mother’s protector as repeated seizures put her life — and the lives of others — in danger. Even more traumatic, her famous father witnessed and failed to protect her from abuse at the hands of Undercliff’s caretaker when she was young, and during her teenage years, on one of the many nights on which he’d imbibed too much with his fellow writers, Eberhart himself put his hands on her in a way that crossed both physical and emotional lines. Cherington’s elegant memoir is a clear-eyed chronicle of her journey to adulthood and her struggle to reconcile the lauded public figure her father presented with the deeply flawed human she knew and loved, for all his shortcomings; a man who, she says, “always want[ed] the world to be as he imagined it.”

A remarkable new entry into the canon of some 700 books, biographies, lectures, essays and articles about Richard Eberhart, “Poetic License” is at once a profoundly personal story and an illuminating meditation on privileged and famous men and the reasons their bad behavior is so frequently allowed.

Old Stories, Some Not True and other poems book cover
Old Stories, Some Not True and other poems
Tim Gillespie ’89G
Moon Path Press
May 2020
To grasp the wit, whimsy and breadth of literary reference packed between the covers of “Old Stories, Some Not True,” one need read only the poem “The Barflies Discuss the King’s Impending Visit,” which brings together a cross-cultural all-star list of tricksters from Prometheus to B’rer Rabbit to Tom Sawyer, who are gathered to “ponder a proper gift for the regal flimflam man.” It is perhaps the most quintessential poem in an anthology that defies categorization — a robust collection of some 75 mostly narrative poems that deftly elide myth and the modern (think King Agamemnon boasting, “You can do anything when you’re a star”), by turns humorous and heartbreaking. Informed in large part by the experiences of Gillespie’s nearly 40-year teaching career, the deceptively straightforward poems in this collection tackle subjects as universal as love and grief and as grounded as a garden in spring.
From the Mountains to the Sea
Kimberly Jarvis ’98G, ’02G
University of Massachusetts Press
June 2020
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any UNH alumni are familiar with the story of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’ 1973 efforts to build a massive oil refinery on Durham’s Great Bay coastline, and the manner in which a feisty group of local housewives rallied to thwart that effort. Fewer, however, might know that citizen activists similarly turned away threats to both Franconia and Sandwich Notches during the same era: in Franconia, from a proposal to run Interstate 93 through Franconia Notch at the foot of the famous “Old Man of the Mountain,” and in Sandwich, from a massive development project that would forever alter the Granite State’s so-called last “wild and lovely place.” In “From the Mountains to the Sea,” Jarvis, a professor of history at Nebraska’s Doane University who earned her doctorate at UNH, unpacks these three episodes and how history, memory and tradition created a strong sense of place that informed locals’ efforts to protect these prized natural areas from development in the face of increasing pressures from business and government in the decades following World War II.

From the Mountains to the Sea book cover
From the Mountains to the Sea book cover
From the Mountains to the Sea
Kimberly Jarvis ’98G, ’02G
University of Massachusetts Press
June 2020
M

any UNH alumni are familiar with the story of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’ 1973 efforts to build a massive oil refinery on Durham’s Great Bay coastline, and the manner in which a feisty group of local housewives rallied to thwart that effort. Fewer, however, might know that citizen activists similarly turned away threats to both Franconia and Sandwich Notches during the same era: in Franconia, from a proposal to run Interstate 93 through Franconia Notch at the foot of the famous “Old Man of the Mountain,” and in Sandwich, from a massive development project that would forever alter the Granite State’s so-called last “wild and lovely place.” In “From the Mountains to the Sea,” Jarvis, a professor of history at Nebraska’s Doane University who earned her doctorate at UNH, unpacks these three episodes and how history, memory and tradition created a strong sense of place that informed locals’ efforts to protect these prized natural areas from development in the face of increasing pressures from business and government in the decades following World War II.

Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 book cover
Writing Across the Color Line typography title
Lucas Dietrich ’16G
University of Massachusetts Press
July 2020
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he turn of the 20th century was a period of experimental possibility for writers of color in the United States as they began to collaborate with the predominantly white publishing trade to make their work commercially available. In “Writing Across the Color Line,” Dietrich, who earned his doctorate in English from UNH and now teaches at Lesley University, analyzes publishers’ and writers’ archives to show how authors including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Charles W. Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, W. E. B. Du Bois and Sui Sin Far drew readers into their texts by subverting existing stereotypes and adapting styles of literary regionalism and dialect writing.

—Kristin Waterfield Duisberg
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