common ground fair bestsellers

This was our 30th year selling books at Common Ground Fair, and we thought that it would be fun to share our bestseller list from this year's fair:

1 - Bringing It to the Table - Wendell Berry
2 - Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada - David Spahr
3 - Forest Trees of Maine - Maine Forest Service
4 - Winter Harvest Handbook - Eliot Coleman
5 - Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollen
6 - Notes on a Lost Flute - Kerry Hardy
7 - Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
8 - No Impact Man - Colin Beavan
9 - Not Far From the Tree - John Bunker
10 - Mushrooms of Northeast North America - George Barron

Bill Berkson poetry reading

Poet/author/art critic Bill Berkson will give a poetry reading on Monday, October 19, 4 PM at Gulf of of Maine Books. He will be in Maine reading from his new collection:Portrait and Dream - new and selected poems (Coffee House Press), appearing at Bates, Colby and UMO.Other Bill Berkson titles in stock here include: Hymns of St. Bridget & other writings - a collaborative poetry collection by Bill Berkson and Frank O'Hara, with a cover by Alex Katz,What's your idea of a good time? = a book of interviews questions and answers between Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer,The Sweet Singer of Modernism and other art writings 1985-2003, and Sudden Address - selected lectures 1981-2006 (with a philip guston cover) which includes a lecture given at the Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture. Here is a poem by Bill Berkson from that talk:

A Lady At Her Writing Table

I chose love and friendship over
work, then
work and friendship over
suspended disbelief
- won't love conquer all?
I'll never work again.
Don't call me.

Mahmoud Darwish

We have just received a new collection of poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (we carry a number of his books) His new book A River Dies of Thirst - journals - is translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham and published by Archipelago Books. Darwish has said "I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit - a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing, I want a language...that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation."
Here's a poem from the book:
I am only him

Far away, behind his footsteps
wolves bite moonbeams

Far away, ahead of his footsteps,
stars light up the treetops

close to him
blood flows from the veins of stones

Therefore he walks and walks and walks
until he melts away
and the shadows swallow him up at the end of this journey

I am only him
and he is only me
in different images.

Mahmoud Darwish
1941-2008