Photos by Loretta Jankowski
By Pat Summers Special Writer
This was “shop talk” on an elevated plane. It encompassed poetry through the ages and personal references to poets laureate and Nobel and Pulitzer winners. All with ebullience.
Settled in at home during the week before its dedication, Scott and Hella McVay were telling the tale of the poetry trail they have created at the nearby headquarters of the D&R Greenway Land Trust. Agreeing with each other, appreciating each other’s bon mots along the way and sometimes over-talking each other in sheer enthusiasm, they virtually re-enacted their search for the right poems to post along the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail.
Savoring the artful uniqueness of each one, Mr. McVay read aloud from various poets’ letters to them, sometimes reciting from their poems. His wife dug out the copy of the trail sign with that poet’s work, and then they both exclaimed over it, recalling how and how long they’ve known this or that poet.
Paper flew more than figuratively as they recounted how the poetry part of the trail was built. This is their thank-you gift to the community where they’ve lived for 52 years, one they hope will “stir in the young a joy of language and poetry and quicken the interest in others,” moving all visitors to want to know more about the poet, the poems or the subject.
A Greenway board member since 1994 — with a few years out while her husband served as 16th president of New York’s Chautauqua Institution — Hella McVay says, “We had the visual arts pretty much from the beginning here,” citing the “beautiful barn” with space to exhibit. “We thought, how about verbal arts?”
Given the Greenway’s “spectacular sites,” the idea of a poetry trail suggested itself, combining land with literary art. And “this site is close to everything — playing fields, the Johnson Park school, town,” she adds.
Then came the year-long task of selecting the poems for the trail. The McVays’ job would have been much easier if they hadn’t known, and loved, so much poetry.
“We always had certain poems we loved,” Ms. McVay says, “and being close to nature, both of us, and traveling all over the world ….” That, in addition to their long connection with the Dodge Poetry Festival, an initiative of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, with which Mr. McVay served as founding executive director for many years. Through that event and Chautauqua, the couple forged lasting personal ties with countless poets.
A mathematician and longtime math teacher, Ms. McVay was also a founder of Princeton’s Whole Earth Center; she’s a gardener, nature photographer and installation artist. (To do justice to this couple’s full resumes would be impossible here.)
Poems the McVays ultimately chose share a “connective theme” — the natural world and its relation to the poetic imagination. They also had to be accessible to those who will walk the trail.
The result: Poems that are “familiar, ancient, surprising, new,” written by famous and not-so-famous people, including, Mr. McVay stresses, “a lot of women.” International in scope, representing 10 lands and cultures, the poems span some 2,400 years, from the 3rd century B.C. to last summer. About half of the 47 poets included are still alive and well. and in a couple cases, sure to become poets laureate, he believes.
The trail itself is a mile- long loop that begins at an allee of sycamores then climbs a hill where American chestnuts grow. “At the top of the hill, we can look all the way out to the Sourlands and down to a gorgeous, gorgeous meadow,” Ms. McVay says.
One of five hand-hewn wooden benches by master craftsman David Robinson is positioned there. Others are placed along the trail near longer poems so walkers can sit and absorb them. The signs Ms. McVay designed were produced by Zienowicz Signs, which shares a Trenton building with Robinson’s Natural Edge business.
She also produced the multi-colored “poetry prayer flags” mounted on tall bamboo poles at the beginning of the trail. They echo those the couple had seen in Tibet, albeit without handwritten poems on them. “The wind takes them into the universe,” she begins, and “they fray and unravel, just like us,” her husband finishes.
W. S. Merwin, current poet laureate of the United States; Rumi,13th century Persian poet and best-seller today; Mary Oliver and Robert Frost, Pulitzer winners; Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; Mary DeLia, New Jersey poet — these six and 41 others make up the Greenway’s poetry pantheon.
Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Snow” captures the essence of winter, Mr. McVay says, while Penny Harter’s “Recycling Starlight,” about grief, is “a gift to humanity.” Billy Collins’s “Ave Atque Vale” – about a groundhog (“He traveled with me for miles”) — and Paul Muldoon’s “Hedgehog” are among the trail poems that “talk to one another.”
The couple discovered Mary DeLia and her poem, “Vacant Land,” at a U.S. 1 Poets reading last summer. The longest poem along the trail, it’s about so-called “vacant” land that in reality hosts a hundred species of birds and all kinds of butterflies. “This poem speaks to the mission of D&R, and ‘builds’ like (Ravel’s) ‘Bolero,” he exclaims.
Galway Kinnell wrote about blackberry-eating, while Robert Frost salutes “A Considerable Speck” (“It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,/Yet must have had a set of them complete”).
Translators “bring to us from the rest of the world rarely spoken languages,” Ms. McVay says, and her husband adds, “Almost all significant poets are translators.” He cites Eliot Weinberger, who translated the work of Mexican Octavio Paz, as “an artist of the first magnitude.” Translators involved with any trail poems are scrupulously credited.
Before all the recognition and titles; behind the honors and achievements — and their two daughters and three grandchildren — it was the two of them. Now, nominally retired, it’s the two of them again. And the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail.
On the Web: www.drgreenway.org.

