The Road Beneath Our Feet

Afterword

This is the second ekphrastic poetry book to come from the writers and artists retreats at Toad Hall in New Hampshire. The first volume, Poet Trees, was completed and published a year after the 2018 retreat.

These photos in The Road Beneath Our Feet were chosen by poets at the 2019 retreat, selected from several hundred prints that I laid out, covering every table top and flat surface in Toad Halls conference room. The selected images ranged from lighthearted and fun to serious and somber.

Once I returned home and began designing the book, it was obvious that the only way to weave the diverse collection together would be to incorporate additional photos. As that process got underway, Grace invited more poets to participate and assigned them to the new images. Finally, two  years after the 2019 retreat, everything coalesced into these pages.

“How A Poem Is Written”

When I first read this poem by Grace, I knew it belonged in this book. It is one of only two instances where the poems were written before the photos were chosen, and there were good reasons for this. I wanted a strong statement to set the tone for the book. What better way to open this book than with a snow-dusted Allegheny mountain and a poem whose breath is as clear and crisp as my own breath was on that winter day!

“The Magellanic Clouds of Viet Nam,” also by Grace, is about her late husband’s pilgrimage to the memorial on the National Mall to find the names of his Navy companions chiseled in stone. I requested that we use it here because I always remember that poem when I look at this image.

Every other poem in this book was inspired by the photographic image chosen by the poet, as a verbal description of what was seen and imagined.

My deepest thanks and appreciation goes to Grace for her insights and for all of her work with the poets, and to the poets themselves for reinforcing a lesson that I sometimes forget: the meaning of a photograph belongs to the viewer; it arises from a resonance between the heart, the brain, and the soul, past, present, and future.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Grace Cavalieri, who besides adding her voice to this volume, coordinated work from the eleven other poets featured here. Grace viewed dozens of design changes and bounced title ideas back and forth with me until I finally arrived at one that I liked. My appreciation to each of these poets and to Maria van Beuren, whose Toad Hall retreat was where this work began.

—Dan Murano