“The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.”

— George Herbert, "The Flower"

That sense of a gift freely given is echoed in Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Cold Spring,” perhaps one of the loveliest of spring poems — “Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies/begin to rise:/up, then down, then up again:/ lit on the ascending flight,/ drifting simultaneously to the same height,/ — exactly like the bubbles in champagne….. And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer/ these particular glowing tributes/ every evening now throughout the summer.”

As an added gift, the epigraph to “A Cold Spring” is from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “Spring — Nothing is so beautiful as Spring.” Indeed! (All these poems can be found on poetryfoundation.org.)

So, in these Notes for April, I offer “tributes of pleasure” to some of those who are contributing to the life of the library, making it, in George Herbert’s words “new, tender, quick,” words from his poem “Love Unknown” that belong to any time or season but somehow especially to now. Incidentally, his birthday is April 3 ... something to celebrate!

“Waking Up To The Earth” is the title of the anthology that Connecticut poet laureate Margaret Gibson will be presenting on Sunday, April 11, with a group of Connecticut poets reading their poems. As Keats wrote, “The poetry of earth is never dead.”

Gibson is devoted to helping us hear it, through her own poetry and as an advocate for that of others.

An exciting publishing event this month is a collection of James Merrill’s letters edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser titled “A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill.” It is hard to imagine two more qualified people to handle such a large project — and that it is coming out on the anniversary of the death of James Merrill’s close friend and fellow poet Sandy McClatchy has a powerful significance.

Life continues and is indeed “new, tender, quick.”

Gregory Dowling, in his excellent review of the letters in the Wall Street Journal, writes “the art, the music, the reading in esoteric subjects, the daily life of shopping and cooking — and, most important, the friendships...This book immerses us in that world, and enriches our understanding of the poetry that came out of it.”

We have a little taste of that friendship, food and poetry in James Merrill’s life here in Stonington — those parsnips in Eleanor Pereny’s garden immortalized in his poem “From the Cupola” — “Finally I reach a garden where I am to uproot/ the last parsnips for my sisters’ dinner….. I look at them a long while/ mealy and soiled...blind… with tender blindness. Then I bury them/ once more in memory of us.”

In other book news, local author, friend and neighbor David Leeming, James Baldwin’s biographer and author of many books on myth, has two new books that will be published later this year. One is “a discussion of Native American creation myths in the context of and as opposed to American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and the reality of a nation built on stolen people and stolen land.”

The second is in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series and is on world mythology. It is a survey of the various cultural treatments of universal topics — deity, creation, the flood, the trickster and the hero. Leeming has kindly agreed to give talks on both these books once we can have in person programs again.

Thanks to the thoughtful generosity of James Longenbach, we have some important additions to our poetry collection, his highly regarded works on the art of poetry as well as editions of his very fine lyrics which we did not own. In this regard I want to pay tribute (“tributes of pleasure”) to Longenbach’s father, artist and educator Burton Longenbach, for his enchanting drawing on the cover of “Stone Cottage, Pound, Yeats & Modernism,” James’s acclaimed critical study of the friendship of Yeats and Pound.

Burton’s line drawing of Stone Cottage matches exactly the description of the cottage and Ashdown Forest and its history at the beginning of the book — Ashdown Forest, haunt of The Venerable Bede when he wasn’t at Lindisfarne, and home to the Five Hundred Acre Wood, scene of the adventures of Winnie the Pooh! Land of enchantments. No wonder it appealed to Yeats.

It also seems appropriate in spring and in Poetry Month to recall Ezra Pound’s famous dictum “Make it New” — which in turn recalls the 17th century physician Sir Thomas Browne — inspiration to Herman Melville in his writing of “Moby Dick” and a favorite author of Elizabeth Bishop’s. In his introduction to his delightful essay “The Garden of Cyrus,” Browne wrote to his friend Nicholas Bacon, “of old things we write something new.”

Which brings me to another book donated by James Longenbach and just added to our collection: “Conversations with Joanna Scott.” In one of these revealing interviews, Scott said, “I have always appreciated the power of fiction to make us responsive…. To give us the ability to go out and see the world with freshness and intensity.” Again, new — new ways of seeing.

Longenbach and Scott will be giving a reading for the library from their new work on June 17, Longenbach from his new book of poetry, “Forever,” and Scott from her new collection of stories “Excuse Me While I Disappear.”

Still celebrating poetry, the “Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt” has been added to the collection as has “Love Amy,” her selected letters.

As I mentioned before, Willard Spiegelman’s biography of Amy Clampitt will be published later this year. As will Jonathan Post’s book on Elizabeth Bishop — his second VSI book following his authoritative study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems which came out in 2017.

Both Willard and Jonathan have kindly agreed to give talks on their much awaited books later this year. What a wealth of talent and generosity we enjoy. So much that is new happening at the library, always! Now and at every season “new, tender, quick.”

Belinda deKay is the recently retired former director of Stonington Free Library.