University of New England - Innovation for a Healthier Planet

Constance Hunting collection, 1979–1996

Full finding aid (pdf)

Collection Scope and Content

The contents of this collection include photocopies of newspaper and magazine interviews with poet, editor and publisher Hunting and a color photo of the author. Also are two undated photocopies of essays Hunting wrote and a group photograph of an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Puckerbrush Press which she founded in 1971. MWWC holds a large number of her publications.

Biographical/Historical Note

Born in Rhode Island in 1925, Constance Hunting was a poet and publisher widely known in the Northeastern United States. She received her B.A. from Brown University in 1947, studied at Duke University from 1950 to 1953, and then lived in West Lafayette, Indiana, until 1968. In 1968 she and her husband Robert moved to Orono, Maine, where he became chair of the English Department at University of Maine, Orono. Constance Hunting taught English literature and creative writing at UMO until her death on April 5th, 2006.

Hunting trained as a classical pianist, but is best known for her work as a poet and for her promotion of other Maine writers through the Puckerbrush Review literary magazine, which she established in 1971. She was also the founder and editor of Puckerbrush Press, which, over the twenty-eight years of its existence, published a great variety of work by many writers, domestic and international, including May Sarton, James Kelman, Angelica Garnett, and other figures from the Bloomsbury Group.

Works by Hunting include After the Stravinsky Concert and Other Poems (1969); Cimmerian and Other Poems (1972); Beyond the Summerhouse: A Narrative Poem (1976); Nightwalk and Other Poems (1980); Dream Cities (1982); Collected Poems 1969–1982 (1983); A Day at the Shore: A Poem (1983); Between the Worlds: Poems 1983–1988 (1989); Hawkedon (1990); The Myth of Horizon (1991); At Rochebonne: A Poem (1994); The Shape of Memory (1998); Natural Things: Collected Poems 1969–1998 (1999); An Amazement (2002); and The Sky Flower (2005). Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.