Author Talk - “Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable” by Bob Perschel

The Vineyard Haven Public Library is pleased to welcome Vineyard resident and professional forester Bob Perschel for a talk about his fifty-year quest in pursuit of something larger than all of us, a quest documented in his new book, “Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable.” This event will be held at 4:00 PM on Friday, September 4th, at the Vineyard Haven Public Library, located at 200 Main Street in Vineyard Haven. Free and open to the public, no registration required.

“Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable” is a collection of stories and poems offering a rare and moving account of what happens when deep scientific knowledge of the forest meets a search for transcendence within it. Drawing on Jungian concepts of the numinous, those encounters with an awe-inspiring force that defies full articulation, Perschel’s poems emerge from the lived intimacy of forest work: marking timber alone in winter woods, listening to the life cycle of an ancient oak, and reckoning with the weight of human impact on a landscape. The result is a collection that is both deeply personal and urgently ecological.

The collection is organized into three thematic sections. The first, Forestry, explores the spiritual and ethical dimensions of forest stewardship through poems including “Marking Timber,” “Lie Down: A Forester’s Directive,” and “The Last Twitch.”  The second section, Life, reveals how the natural world can provide meaning and weave its influence through our lives with poems such as “Meeting the Green Lady”, “The Place Where Life Begins”, and “Snake River Bar.”   The third section, Climate Change, confronts the moral stakes of the current environmental crisis with poems such as “Epistle to Left on the Earth,” “J.D. Skis Ukraine,” and “Memo to a Prospective Leader.”

Robert T. Perschel has helped conserve six million acres of New England’s forests during a four-decade career as a professional forester. He chaired the 53-member Northern Forest Alliance and co-founded the Forest Stewards Guild, a national organization of ecologically focused foresters. As Executive Director of the New England Forestry Foundation, he led the creation of Exemplary Forestry standards that use climate-smart management to offset significant regional carbon emissions. He holds a Psychology degree from Yale College (1973) and a Masters of Forestry Science from the Yale School of the Environment (1979). Bob lives in an oak forest on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard.

For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.