Like Thoreau's journals come the poems of this book. Birch Cottage comprises a number of poems written over many years in a small hand-made house deep in the woods of southern New Hampshire, in the Souhegan valley and the region of Mt. Monadnock. Among the quiet woods, with the birds, the wild turkeys, the animals that live in and under the house, and on the mountain is a world apart. An ancient way of life is celebrated in poems divided into three parts, ending with an ice storm disaster to the delicate birch grove, and the way woodland life reacts to that. The antithesis of that way, the way of our estrangement from nature, is recalled in the poem "Notes to Thoreau." "Well, Henry, like you I can maintain sanity, Confront essentials, and reflect on madness In my hand-made cottage in the woods..." The title and idea for the long poem "36 Views of Mt. Monadnock" were inspired by the famous series of 19th century prints by the Japanese master Hokusai: "36 Views of Mt. Fuji."