by Louise Hawes
just we two?
Here’s a place for my words;
here, only yours will do.
And would it matter, really,
after all is said and done,
who made which piece of glory?
Who, this moon? Who, that sun?
The pen drops from your hand,
but there’s still more to say.
So I must write our final line,
which is simply
stay.
About This Book
The facts: In 2008, some forty-five years after the death of Robert Frost, a group of teenagers broke into the poet’s historically preserved summer home in Ripton, Vermont. Nestled in the New England countryside his poetry celebrates, Frost’s farmhouse was not elegant or expensively furnished, but apparently, it was the perfect place to drink and smoke, off the main road and far from town. By the time the party was over, the house had been set on fire and left in a shambles. When police discovered the majority of the teens were underage high school students, a resourceful judge sentenced them to take a course in the famous man’s poetry.
The fiction: From the time I read about this case, my author’s “What If?” machinery kicked into high gear. What if the vandalism happened, not in Vermont, but in North Carolina, where I live? What if the celebrity poet was also from my adopted state, someone who did for the South what Frost had done for the North—made its landscape and people the heart of his work? What if this poetic giant was still alive when his house was destroyed? And what if he decided to teach that course himself?
The characters: I’ve read and cherished Robrt Frost’s poetry for years. So there are a few aspects of Rufus Baylor’s aesthetics and history that Frost fans may recognize. But most of his personality and all of his poems are his own. Sarah, of course, is totally my creation, and is based on no one alive, except in my head and heart.
Acknowledgments
My first readers include my daughter, Robin; my son, Marc; Frances Wood; Marjorie Hudson; and Karen Pullen.
My dreamy agent is Ginger Knowlton, who believes in books and readers and me.
After that? It’s so much fun to reach the stage in the publishing process where you have fellow travelers, collaborators who make the going less lonely and the final product a lot more compelling. Could anyone be luckier than to find an editor like Karen Wojtyla, who leaves this book better and bigger than she found it? Or a team like art director Michael McCartney and calligrapher Sarah Jane Coleman, who came up with a cover everyone I know wants to frame? Or a copy editor like Erica Stahler, who cares about the sound that sand crabs make? (Really.)
Thank you all. It took a village.
LOUISE HAWES has written books for readers of all ages, including Rosey in the Present Tense, Waiting for Christopher, The Vanishing Point, and Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand. Her work has won awards from Bank Street College of Education, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New York Public Library, the Children’s Book Council, the Independent Booksellers Association, the International Literacy Association, and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). Louise has written poems from the time she could form letters, but poetry has always been something she kept to herself—a sort of emotional time line and diary. The Language of Stars marks the first time she’s “gone public” with her poems. A tribute to Frost, one of her favorite poets, it is a sort of “debut novel” for an author who’s written several well-loved books but never one so close to her heart.
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Simon & Schuster • New York
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen
authors.simonandschuster.com/Louise-Hawes
ALSO BY LOUISE HAWES
Anteaters Don’t Dream and Other Stories
Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand
Muti’s Necklace
Nelson Malone Saves Flight 942
Rosey in the Present Tense
The Vanishing Point
MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Louise Hawes
Jacket illustration copyright © 2016 by Sarah Jane Coleman
Jacket photographs copyright © 2016 by Thinkstock
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CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4814-6241-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4814-6243-3 (eBook)