For the past year and a half, Sydney Lea — my predecessor as poet laureate of Vermont — and I have been editing an anthology, Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, which Green Writers Press published last month.

It took us this long to search Vermont’s valleys and mountains and to complete the task of identifying the state’s myriad contemporary poets. Both Syd Lea and I detected in submission after submission Vermont as a muse, an abiding historical presence that has inspired so many of its denizens with its character of independence, self-reliance, wit, fortitude, ingenuity, invention, daring and a love of silence. Vermont poet and poetry critic for The New Yorker, Daniel Chiasson, captures in his introduction to the anthology the native magic of Vermont’s landscape and heritage:

Vermont tempts poets to epiphany by staying silent, or cold, or flinty, or dark, ironizes their praise. Many people move to Vermont because of the idea of it, an idea that has proven remarkably durable over time: as these poems suggest, so powerfully do the daily necessities of living there, of surviving there, assert themselves. This is where (Robert) Frost comes in: Frost’s poems are the great rural instruction manual for our neck of the woods. His influence is everywhere in the poems collected here, which so often take ‘nature’ not as an idyllic refuge but as a site of careful, strenuous, and repeated steps or actions. The Vermonters in this book come from and live all over. Roads Taken is a ‘constellation/of patches and pitches,’ proof to me that Vermont will always require the imagination of its citizens to exist.

Our criteria for selecting poets for this volume were simple: Each poet had to have lived for a significant period of time in Vermont (five years), published at least one book of poetry and met aesthetic standards that both Syd and I agreed on. We did not consider poetry published by vanity presses, but were receptive to such poets as Robert Penn Warren, Rachel Hadas and Vijay Seshadri, who have made Vermont their home for many months out of the year for several decades.

So, there were both concrete and subjective measures in our selection process. Our editorial process took longer than we expected as we continued discovering poets who met our criteria up until a week before we went to press. To those eligible poets we may have left out, we apologize and will do our best to include in a second edition, if there is one.

The anthology includes more than 80 poets: In addition to such celebrated poets as Robert Frost, Ruth Stone, Hayden Carruth, Grace Paley, Galway Kinnell, David Budbill, Louise Gluck, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Verandah Porche, we included dozens of younger and emerging poets — Bianca Stone Kerrin McCadden, Karin Gottshall, Alison Prine, and Paige Ackerson-Keily — whose work promises to sustain Vermont’s remarkable poetic legacy. (As for those poets living in Vermont who are not included in this anthology because they either don’t have a book out or haven’t been here long enough to meet our residency standard, Syd and I have planned a reading to celebrate them on Nov. 4 at Next Stage in Putney, Vt.)

While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in this volume claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the rich and ongoing legacy of the state’s poetic tradition.

W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for William Butler Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Too many read this line as a renunciation of poetry’s ability to effect change in both individual lives and the course of human events. But too few readers finish the stanza in which Auden qualifies this claim with a metaphorical explanation of poetry as “a way of happening:

It survives in the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

While conceding that poetry may be powerless to make anything happen in the way that a political decision makes something happen, Auden claims instead that poetry prepares its readers for arriving at enlightened decisions that in time not only make something happen, but define us as people, in the way that the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, both prose poems, define us as a nation.

The poems in this Vermont anthology resound with lasting news, betraying as they do, in their readership and literary currency, their provenance, which are the very “raw towns that we believe and die in.”

In this time when truth is under assault from the highest places, poetry witnesses to truths in memorable, courageous ways that are essential expression, even when the subject is a reviled creature, as Hayden Carruth testifies to in his poem I Little Citizen, Little Survivor:

The brown rat that most people so revile and fear

and castigate has brought his wife to live with me

again. Welcome, little citizen, little survivor.

Lend me your presence, and I will lend you mine.

Or Galway Kinnell in his poem The Silent Evening, in which he tests the limits of language while contemplating the loss of his beloved:

Words, in our mouths,

are almost ready, already, to bandage the one

whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when

we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches

from this moment to that. Then I will go back

to that silent evening, when the past just managed

to overlap the future, if only by a trace,

and the light doubles and shines

through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth.

Or Ruth Stone in her poem Speculation in which she imagines her death with visionary if unorthodox affirmation:

The wits

Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead

I do not heed the first rain out of winter,

Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center

The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made;

And alone shine in a phosphorous glow,

So, in this little plot where I am laid.

All anthologies suffer from the same shortcoming, namely, a lack of thorough representation, and while I know Syd Lea and I have collected only a sample from Vermont’s contemporary poets, he and I hope this anthology will lead readers, especially students and young readers of poetry, to the books of the poets represented here, as well other strong poets writing throughout the country and the world.

Chard deNiord is Vermont’s poet laureate. He lives in Westminster West.