Comments on: Broadfork Farm https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/broadfork-farm Wed, 08 Oct 2025 05:02:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 By: Sandra Knauf https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/broadfork-farm#comment-40 Wed, 17 Jan 2018 15:36:11 +0000 http://wpnew.thepoetrybox.com/?post_type=product&p=157#comment-40 The first story I read was “Gloucestershire Old Spots” a piece about schoolchildren visiting the pigs and other animals on the farm. That story is a microcosm of life on Broadfork Farm, which has the humble goal to “feed a few and teach caring.” That caring, along with the sharing, the interconnectedness, and the realities of the bitter and the sweet are examined and celebrated in Knoll’s book. In it, you’ll find a world that is mostly breathtakingly beautiful, but where the ugly isn’t sugarcoated; murderous animals, for example, exist on the farm and in the wilderness surrounding it, as do reminders of the problems of the world outside, where atrocities like terrorism, hate crime, and exploitation of humans and land, sometime take center stage. Tricia shows us how all relate, all are interconnected.

One of the things I relish in Knoll’s work is that she paints with all the emotions. The delightful intermingles with the dark, and even the banal is important enough (because it too, is part of life) to be noted. One poem, “Motha of the Bride” brought tears to my eyes, and I laughed out loud at a stanza in “Farmku”, a poem that shares over a dozen unique moments of farm-life, haiku style.

the scarecrow
drops her bra
in the forget-me-nots

(Gosh, I love that.)

While there are many things to admire about Tricia Knoll’s work, perhaps her greatest quality is that she is an eco-poet who doesn’t overwhelm you with that message. The elegant pictures she paints with her poetry, her many astute, and sometimes wry observations of nature simply show you what she loves about this world. And through her art, you love it too.

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