The Idea of North: Poems of the North Country
About this ebook
Book Review:
"Doug Linder has a most definite idea about the North, especially the area Midwesterners refer to as “The North Shore.” It’s an idea that comes from years of roaming the shores of Lake Superior, getting to know its people, towns, wildlife, and traditions—an idea rooted in sheer love for a place out “In the Middle of Nowhere.” What is the best way to preserve something amazing and beautiful? What is the best way to share it? Linder finds making poetry suitable for both; in one of his “spot of time” poems, he tells his twenty-three-year-old self to “memorize” a meeting with a lone wolf: “Remember his amber eyes, / and his leisurely lope across the snow-covered tundra.” Forty years later, he remembers how the moment pierced him, “setting [him] on fire.” Such transfers of experience fill the collection as the narrator looks for ways to pass his “sense of place” down to the next generation (and the next). “We want them to love what we love,” he admits, and happily for us, the poems in The Idea of North bring us a long way there."
-- Joyce Sutphen, poet laureate of Minnesota (2011-2021) and author of Carrying Water to the Field and This Long Winter
About the author
Doug Linder is a native Minnesotan who splits time between Kansas, where he teaches law, and Lutsen, Minnesota, where he and his wife Cheryl have, for decades, spent their summers. Author of two popular books on legal professionalism, a lecturer on historic trials and civil liberties issues in the “Great Courses” series, and creator of the Web’s largest and most visited website on famous trials, Linder has long kept his poetry from public view—until recently, when his poems began receiving attention in places ranging from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac to Scientific American. He loves to hike, travel, read, canoe, curl, and take regular dips into the energizing waters of Lake Superior.
