Matthew Buckley Smith is the author of Midlife, winner of the 2021 Richard Wilbur Award, and Dirge for an Imaginary World, winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. His poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is Associate Editor of Literary Matters, and he hosts the poetry podcast SLEERICKETS. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters.

A.M. Juster is the former poetry editor for Plough, and has published ten books of original and translated poetry with three more coming soon. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Rattle, The Hudson Review, and other journals. His first book of original poetry won the Richard Wilbur Award, his translation of a Middle Welsh poem won the Willis Barnstone Translation Award, he is the only three-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and he has been awarded two honorary degrees. He tweets extensively about formal poetry across the centuries and cultures at @amjuster.

In the poem Home Burial, Robert Frost portrays a couple's struggle to reconcile their  conflicting ways of dealing with the death of their firstborn child. She is consumed with grief and unable to let go, and he is ready to move on to find some sense of normalcy. They find themselves on two opposing sides of an emotional chasm that seems impossible to bridge. The film is the screen debut of Donald Tongue, an emerging filmmaker who produced, directed, and wrote the screenplay. The film has been selected by six film festivals and won awards for Best Short (Denver Movie Awards) and Best Cinematography (Oregon Short Film Festival). It contains the full text of Frost's poem.

The evolution of barn architecture tells the story of New Hampshire agriculture. Barns changed from early English style to Yankee style, to gambrel and then pole barns to accommodate the changing agriculture. This presentation will be a chronological walk through time, with photo illustrations of barns around the state that are that are examples of these eras of agricultural history.

How do these great lyrics, each standing out in this volume of dramatic narratives, also combine to structure what may be Frost’s greatest book of poems? How do these three poems underline the fading of the rural New England culture of which they celebrate the signature tasks—a culture that North of Boston tries to honor the preserve. How does their late composition and inclusion in this book of poem illustrate something characteristic in Frost’s creative process? Finally, how do these poems, each so focused on concrete details of rural life, become archetypal in their reach, illustrating what Frost means when he says: “My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—- are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts, chairs, and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.”

Pontine Theater Artistic Co-Directors, Greg Gathers & Marguerite Mathews, perform their original stagings of three early poems by Robert Frost. Pontine;s two-person stagings of Frost’s poems feature storytelling, toy theater figures, and rolling panoramas, all created by greg Gathers. The Production features performances of three of Frost’s early poems: “ Wild Grapes,” “The Code,” and “Maple.”

Brian Evans-Jones was Poet Laureate of Hampshire, England, before moving to New England in 2014. He won the Maureen Egan award from Poets & Writers in 2017, and his poems have been published in journals and contests on both sides of the Atlantic. He lives in Sharon, N.H. and teaches through his website The Poetry Place.

Amy Lemmon is the author of five poetry collections, including Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press) and The Miracles (C&R Press). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Court Green, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is Professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY and lives in Astoria, New York.

Hyla Brook Reading Series - Oliver de la Paz

Hyla Brook Reading Series - Liz Ahl

Hyla Brook Reading Series - Martin Elster

hyla brook reading series - Matt Miller