Sudden Eden

Neither the beauty nor the brokenness of the world escapes Verandah Porche’s grasp in her newest collection, Sudden Eden. The orchard and the neighbor’s homely sayings share equally with time and eternity. She is a wise poet who knows her land and its neighbors and the deeper truths of living a rural life in which “Late fruit/keeps its edge as frost/fleeces the pasture.” These poems are about the investments one makes in life, in its loves and causes, its earth and trees, its human community.
 
 
"This book, among other things, is a fitting testimony to Verandah Porche's
longtime service as what I will call a poetry missionary, teaching the value -- nay the centrality -- of the poetic experience to people young and old both in her home state of Vermont and elsewhere. Her collection, Sudden Eden, is cause for celebration."
 
-- Syd Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate, Six Sundays; Toward a Seventh: Selected Spiritual Poems, Young of the Year; A Hundred Himalayas; To the Bone, and others.