Description
“I am blessed to have known the poets who are the subjects of this memoir,” Mike Pride wrote in his Acknowledgments. “They have enriched my life, and I have done my best to represent them as I knew them.” In two straightforward sentences, Pride captured both the spirit that animates this book and the journalistic sensibilities he brought to writing it. Northern Voices explores the work of six remarkable poets, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic, Wesley McNair, and Sharon Olds, all contemporaries, and the ways in which their artistry was shaped by the natural beauties and hard realities of life in New Hampshire. Readers will also meet Seamus Heaney and Hayden Carruth, and come away—just as the author did—enriched by the experience.
Mike Pride was a distinguished journalist, writer, and historian. For more than thirty years, he ran the newsroom of the Concord Monitor, lifting the newspaper to national prominence. He emerged from retirement to serve as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, only to retire again when he developed a blood cancer. He wrote, co-wrote, or edited eight previous books and completed the manuscript for this book, his ninth, in the months before his death in April 2023 at the age of seventy-six. His previous books dealt most often with the human experience of war, grounded in the Civil War and World War II. Northern Voices is his most personal book, grounded instead in his love of poetry.
In this exquisite, posthumous work, Mike Pride resurrects the lives of poets as if they were saints, highlighting their immortal efforts with his own lyrical prose and riveting storytelling. Each artist vividly comes to life—and Pride himself, with his humility and grace and genuine sympathy, becomes their equal. A stunning achievement.
—Ken Burns
Northern Voices is a gift. Mike Pride has let us in on his long friendships with good poets. His loving attention and goodwill animate his essays. He knew how his poet friends lived in the world and in their poems. His essays will send you forth to read the poems – to Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, and Charlie Simic, among others. And that’s the highest compliment. Poets live when they are read. Mike Pride knew this. He lives here, too. I only wish there were a sequel, or two.
—Howard Mansfield, author of Chasing Eden and Dwelling in Possibility
Mike Pride was one of the greatest newspaper editors of his generation, a demanding and generous mentor to hundreds of journalists over his quarter century stewardship of the Concord Monitor. In Northern Voices, we discover something that made Mike so rare—an ear and love for poetry and an appreciation for the values poets share with reporters. Here Mike tells the story of his friendships with the great New England poets, writers whose gifts of precision and storytelling he wanted for his newsroom. The landscape that gave us the poetry of Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin and others also gave us Pride; what a joy to revisit their genius.
—Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University
