Let Freedom Ring

Islander Mev Good will tell the story of two people, one white and one black, and their shared pursuit of freedom, in A Daughter of a Slave Gives Me My Freedom: A Personal Account, his talk on Tuesday, April 26, at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Haven Public Library.

British neurologist and bestselling author Oliver (Awakenings) Sacks noted that enjoying art is not just a visual experience — it’s an emotional one: “In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep.”

Poetry can be called an esoteric art for but what homeowner can’t relate to Alan Dugan’s Love Song: I and Thou

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

I am no carpenter.

He would fashion a paintbrush from a twig and some of his own hair, he would grab whatever was available — plywood, masonite, a seashell — and in this way, Captain John. J. Ivory created an eccentric artistic legacy befitting his legendary vagabond life.

C.L. Fornari Will Give Talk

To Garden Club Tuesday

Artist, garden writer, host of the radio show Gardenline, and associate producer of PBS documentary Odyssey, expert gardener and landscape consultant C.L. Fornari is also the author of A Garden Lover’s Martha’s Vineyard. She will be speaking on the Island at the Garden Club’s monthly meeting on Tuesday, April 19 at 1 p.m. at the Wakeman Center on Lambert’s Cove Road in West Tisbury.

Artemis’s Caution

When you look at a deer

what do you see?

Carrier of ticks? Raider of you garden? Meat for your freezer?

Pest, scourge, rodent with antlers?

When you contemplate a deer,

the only large animal left to roam wild

in our woods, a brilliantly fired creature who bolts off

with lifted white tail, speed like a gazelle, consider