English poet John Keats wrote about the paradox of fall in his 1820 ode “To Autumn,” where a time of fullness to the brim is also a time of near ending. You might remember the final image — “gathering swallows twitter in the skies” — which sounds a melancholic suspension between one world and the next.
It is this world between that Rachel Hadas captures in her love poems to Vermont.
Although Hadas, 77, has written poems about Vermont for her entire career, she speaks more specifically from her perch in the Northeast Kingdom in her most recent collection, Pastorals. Hadas coaxes the reader into noticing the things that anchor us to this place.
Hadas spends the winters in New York City and summers in Vermont. She has lived for more than 40 summers in a white family farmhouse overlooking a vast valley in Danville, paying attention to all things Vermont: the insects, the birds, the fields, the houses, the neighbors, the apples, the cows, the stories. Like Keats, Hadas offers that world to us in glorious suspension.
A poet, translator and essayist, Hadas has published 25 books of poetry and four books of prose, translated many works, and earned accolades, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. For almost half a century, her poems have reveled in the details of a moment and her small, precise observations about how a particular place might be suffused with tenderness.
An early poem, “The End of Summer,” considers the significance of a July meteor shower in Vermont:
we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work,
redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
To be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow is the preferred way, even as it is simply a fact that, as she writes in another poem, “we wear our bodies deeper/and deeper into time.” Hadas’ image of the Vermont cow anchors us in substance even as it admits its impermanence. To be tranquil as a cow is to accept the passage of time but also to cultivate a form of consciousness — to focus on a tickle rather than a cataclysm.
In her Pastorals, Hadas unabashedly captures a Vermont that is always on the verge of becoming, even as it fades. These prose poems glitter with images of vibrant growth and delicious surrender. In “Hum of the Season,” dung accumulates: phoebe poop on the house, pigeon poop on the barn and “ants … crawling over the kitchen counter.” The speaker will wipe it all up and wait for the fledglings to “venture out of the nest and stagger around the porch.” Luckily, the cats are safely indoors. “The cycle goes on,” Hadas writes.
It is also a human cycle, with flannel nightgowns distributed to new owners, pink-and-white wallpaper over a bed that collapses under the weight of a jumping child. Things are old or falling apart but also on the verge of transformation: a bookstore named Secondhand Prose, a barn with a caved-in roof, an almost-dead snake in the road. It is a cycle of generations, as in “On My Knees: Morning Messengers”: “Back to my parents. I carry them in me, with me.”
“Draw a Picture of the Iliad” ends with a one-word line: “Multiply.”
Things are becoming or hiding other things in these Vermont poems: a hillside “brimming with water, that never stays the same color” (“Summer Weather”).
The maples stand as “sentinels,” and the meadow acts as “a cover and a memory” (“Meadow”). The promise of what is underneath does not fade. But always the essential unchanging elements remain: “Stone. Moss. Fern. Shadow” (“Walking Around the Triangle: Sermon in Stone”).
Hadas frequently nods to writers whose words shape her perceptions of things, to offer solace or insight or simply companionship. Poets and writers pop up to comment on the things she notices. Some of them are from Vermont, including Galway Kinnell, whose house was a few towns over from the one Hadas invites us into in these prose poems. But there are many more: Chard deNiord, Leland Kinsey, Garrett Keizer and, of course, Robert Frost. “An hour is a year,” deNiord says in Hadas’ “Walking Around the Triangle: Sermon in Stone.”
Hadas, a brilliant translator and essayist, is an academic as well as a poet, and her drive for precision takes her deeper into her own metaphors. “Summer Variations I” asks the question we might be posing today: “What but affection feeds the fire, once summer has subsided into memory?” Later in the poem, she refines the idea: “I might be walking to the compost heap or down the driveway to the mailbox and be struck by–memory isn’t as precise a word as presence.”
“Summer Variations II” ends “And so with this house. With families.” And so small things accumulate. The forward motion continues.
Vermont is not a mythic Arcadia in these pages but a place that answers to patience, to ritual, to the accumulation of tiny observances. That patient ledger is Hadas’ gift: a model for how to live with and within a place and how to keep the small things speaking.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Picturesque Prose | Book review: Pastorals, Rachel Hadas”
This article appears in Dec 10-16 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!