Writing

For many, Anne Bradstreet’s name is familiar from the early pages of anthologies of American poetry or from John Berryman’s famous tribute to her. But few know that she was the first published poet-male or female-to emerge from the wilderness of the New World, or that her slim volume of verse was a runaway bestseller. Now, in this illuminating biography, Charlotte Gordon reveals Anne Bradstreet to be an electrifying personality at the center of one of the most fascinating periods in our country’s history.

Read more about the book or go to the publisher’s website.

Buy at Amazon.

Chapter One

Arrival

AFTER SEVENTY-SEVEN DAYS AT SEA, one Captain Milbourne steered his ship, the Arbella - packed with more than three hundred hungry, exhausted souls - into Salem Harbor, shooting off the ship’s cannon in elation. It was early in the morning of June 12, 1630, a date that would prove to be more fateful to America than the more-famous 1492, but if either the captain or his hapless passengers had expected any kind of fanfare from the New World itself, they were to be disappointed. Far from offering herself up for casual and easy delectation, America hunched like a dark animal, sleeping and black, offering no clues about her contours, let alone the miracles reported by the rumor mill of the 1620s: inland seas, dragons, Indians adorned in golden necklaces, fields sown with diamonds, and bears as tall as windmills.

(more…)

“Charlotte Gordon’s poems are daring and provocative.” – Ray Bentley

“Luminous and powerful with exquisite understatement and subtle imagery. Charlotte Gordon has succeeded brilliantly in evoking the spirit of the Vietnam era, a period during which both she and her country were struggling, often painfully, to come of age.” – Louise Kehoe.