Delmarva Today 2-18-22
Harold Wilson’s guest is historian and poet Anne Yarbrough. They discuss Yarbrough’s book, Refinery, which won the 2021 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Refinery is a book of poetry, but it is much more than that. It is also a book of history – a history of Delaware’s only refinery built in Delaware City in1957, and of the land around it in New Castle County. With her poetry, Yarbrough has woven poetic images of light, color, atmosphere, and water in its multivarious forms, that capture the results of the interplay of these elements through the medium of time. A refinery and its surrounding area might well be an unusual topic for a book of poetry, but with her poetic images Yarbrough teaches us to see the truth and beauty of what time has wrought of this place, and to invest it with meaning for our own precious moment in time.