Böcker av Michael Beadle

Perched near the eastern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Waynesville has long been an attractive destination with its stunning vistas, cool mountain air, and small town charm. For centuries, the Cherokee lived and hunted in what is now western North Carolina. After the Revolutionary War, white settlers moved into the area from all directions to farm and build a new life on the frontier. By the end of the 18th century, families had established a small community known as Mount Prospect. In 1810, the town was renamed Waynesville after the Revolutionary War general "Mad" Anthony Wayne. With the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, Waynesville blossomed as a summer retreat for guests who came to stay at numerous boardinghouses and hotels. By the early 1900s, Waynesville's neighboring town, Hazelwood, became a hotbed of industrial growth with lumber mills and assorted factories producing furniture, leather goods, and rubber products. Hazelwood later merged with Waynesville in 1995.

With its pristine waterways, abundant forests, and teeming wildlife, Haywood County is referred to as a kind of Eden in Cherokee mythology. All natural water flowing through the county originates within its borders. More than a dozen of its peaks rise above 6,000 feet, including Cold Mountain, made famous by the best-selling Charles Frazier novel. Established in 1808, Haywood County developed into a series of farming communities. Waynesville, the county seat, was the site of the last shot of the Civil War east of the Mississippi River and later grew into a popular tourist destination after rail lines were laid through the county in the early 1880s. On the eastern end, Canton thrived with one of the largest paper mills in the nation, still in operation after more than a century. The county is also home to sections of the Appalachian Trail, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Lifting each rock, / we felt its weight in our palms, / closed our eyes / until a name arose…. Even as a child, as the first poem in Beasts of Eden reveals, Michael Beadle took upon himself the joyous burden of naming even the all-too-often unnamable things of this world. In this new collection, Beadle lures us into a realm of fact and fantasy, of history and myth, where we are all-at once-both native and stranger, neighbor and trespasser. With senses so alert to the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the sights, and smells of this world, nothing escapes the fresh wit and seasoned wisdom of this big-hearted poet. Here is a poet who wields a magician's pen that is both worldly and colloquial, as at home in the past as it is in the present. Give yourself-and everyone you love-the gift of this beautiful new collection. -Cathy Smith Bowers, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers