A Book, a Real Book!

Well, here it is at last: my first book of poetry published!

The Hillside Diary is a volume of poems recording four seasons from 2019 and 2020. Sonnets, haiku, free form verse and so on, all describing the little glimpses and moments and thoughts from life on a country hillside. If you’ve subscribed to ACM Weekly for awhile, you’ve probably read some of these.

But here is a whole four seasons collected together in one volume. It includes some of my own favorites. Sonnets to a Monarch butterfly, the first firefly in spring, a deep hoarfrost. Haiku for a mockingbird, a flock of geese, and a very small spider. Days of summer mists, autumn sunlight, winter snowfall, spring rain. Thoughts about yesterdays and tomorrows.

As it’s November again, I’ll include this poem from the collection:

Song of Autumn’s End

Still cold at noon, the keen air kissed
With frost, the sober clouds all furred
Round trees that shelter in the mist
Above the lingering cattle herd.
Within the sober gray immured,
Are green and yellow leaves that keep
A shelter round the silent bird;
All sounds are muted, half-asleep
Save one shrill jay; the slow fog creeps
Through afternoon; the moistened grey
Slips in amongst the grasses, seeps
Across the hillsides, hushing day.
And in its wake the cattle graze;
All’s quiet, all things breathless, still;
The day is drowsing in the haze
As winter wakes along the hill.

And the rest are available here at Amazon.

At present the volume is available for eReaders in particular. My plan is to get the softcover version up shortly—within two or three days if all goes well… which mostly means if I can get the cover sized correctly for printing and properly uploaded. (The cover has held this whole project up for months already, but I am finally coming down the home stretch, so to speak.)

I’ve designed the book and cover myself, I might add. It’s been a fun, frustrating, despair-and-tear-out-your-hair, highly satisfying project. Each in turn and sometimes all at once. I do love design work like this, but the technical aspects for uploading and printing have been daunting.

In fact, I had the interior of the book professionally formatted at one point; then yesterday I at last succumbed to the necessity of tearing into it and redoing it myself. I am most certainly not an experienced hand at this, but I hope that by the time I’m finished I will remember enough to do it again. Volume Two is waiting.

If you do purchase The Hillside Diary, please keep in mind that reviews on Amazon are invaluable to an author!

Cheers!